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01/22/2006:

"Rumsfeld: Venezuela "Overspending""

What are you supposed to do when the world's most over-armed, belligerent and dangerous nation, which outspends all the rest of the world combined on arms, and which is the major arms supplier to the rest of the world, tells a little country like Venezuela that it is guilty of spending "too much" on its military?

The initial response is laughter. What a joke, right? Venezuela, awash in oil revenue and feeling a little threatened by threats from the United States to assassinate its leader and by U.S. funding for groups that are trying to foment a coup, wants to spend a few hundred million bucks on planes from Spain and Brazil to modernize its airforce, and the U.S. State Department gets all worked up.

The transactions are something "we would consider an outsized military buildup," says State Department flak Sean McCormack.

"Outsized military buildup?"
counterpunch.org