TRIUMPH THAT LEFT BRITAIN’S LEADERS HOOKED ON WAR
Witnessing Britain’s forces liberate the Falklands was one of MAX HASTINGS’ proudest moments. But, 30 years on, he fears it left a pernicious legacy
resourced campaigns. The British Army’s ‘can do’ spirit has been shockingly misused.
The public has become bitterly — and rightly — hostile to long drawnout and inconclusive struggles in faraway places. They ask a question which I think is a good one: ‘What is there for us in Iraq or Afghanistan?’ Or, we might add, in Libya. I suspect the Falklands may turn out to be the last really popular war Britain ever fights.
The 1982 war also taught painful lessons about the limits of the absurdly hyped ‘ special relationship’ between Britain and the United States. Forget the legend of the intimacy between Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan: in reality the relationship was difficult and sometimes bitterly fractious, as was that between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Most of the Reagan administration rooted for the fascist junta in Buenos Aires, which they considered vital to their crusade against the Left in South America.
If the president had thrown his full support behind Britain, told the Argentines to quit the Falklands and sounded as if he meant it, it is most unlikely the war would have had to be fought. The declassified transcript of a hotline telephone conversation between the British and American leaders, a few days before the end of the struggle, reveals Reagan imploring Thatcher to accept a diplomatic compromise rather than impose military humiliation on Argentina.
She scornfully rejected such an idea, ‘when we have lost so many of our best men and best ships’, but a fudge was what Reagan wanted. Thanks to U.S. defence secretary Caspar Weinberger — that unusual creature, a passionate Anglophile — our task force got critical intelligence and logistical help from America to win the war.
But the essential message of 1982 was that the ‘special relationship’ abruptly stops being special when Washington sees its own interests differently from ours.
Today, the Americans have made it plain that we are on our own in the continuing dispute about what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls ‘Las Malvinas’. She publicly urges Britain and Argentina to get around a negotiating table. The British Government knows it can expect no help from Washington while fighting its corner in the South Atlantic.
AND that corner still has to be fought. The Argentines lost the 1982 war, and their brutal military dictatorship collapsed as a result, to be replaced by the democracy which persists in Buenos Aires to this day.
But Argentina’s strident, indeed sometimes hysterical president, Cristina Kirchner, denounces the British as ‘pirates’ for our continuing presence in the South Atlantic, and has successfully gained almost unanimous South American support for Argentina’s claim on the islands. Only last week, Peru cancelled the impending visit of a Royal Navy destroyer, in order to show solidarity with Buenos Aires.
Argentina’s passion for those benighted islands is crazy, but longstanding. Modern Argentines learn in school the 1939 poem of Jose Pedroni which begins: ‘ The Malvinas / her Wings speckled with isles/ she is our beauty of the sea/ Fatherland gazes upon her from mother coast/ with a grief that never fades.’
If the Argentines were smart, they would have being wooing the islanders, killing them with kindness, seeking to persuade them that they have a brighter future with a big neighbour than with a weary, remote imperial power. Instead, of course, they relentlessly threaten and bully them, so that unsurprisingly ‘the kelpers’ want nothing to do with Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, the British people, taking just pride in their hard-earned 1982 victory, will never allow any Westminster government to negotiate away the Falklands against their inhabitants’ wishes.
BOTH countries, it seems to me, have become prisoners of the islands. Before 1982, no British government recognised a significant strategic commitment in the South Atlantic. In the 30 years since, we have spent £5 billion to defend them, to justify having fought the war.
A few Falklands families have grown vastly rich from the dumper-trucks of British cash unloaded upon them since 1982. The Islands Council now says cautiously that if serious oil is recovered offshore, it will ‘consider making a contribution’ towards the cost of its own defence.
It seems to me that it will be grotesque if 3,000 Falkland Islanders reap any oil profits, when the money should properly come straight to the poor old British taxpayer. That battle will be very real when we discover — as so far we have not — whether big oil is recoverable.
It is surely right to look back on the Falklands War with national pride, as something difficult that our Armed Forces did magnificently well. But it achieved little of lasting significance to check our shrinkage in the world. Today — irresponsibly, I believe — successive governments have slashed the Armed Forces below the point of critical mass.
We could not again mount a campaign remotely on the scale of 1982. We sent 30,000 men to recover the Falklands, but when the current defence cuts are complete the army will be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000-8,000 men for sustained operations overseas.
We have no aircraft carrier; when the Royal Navy does eventually take delivery of the two new carriers now being built at Rosyth, it cannot afford suitable planes to fly off them.
Economic forces are driving our continuing relative decline, heedless of our martial prowess. I shall forever be grateful to have shared in that extraordinary 1982 odyssey in the South Atlantic, though I shall never forget the price paid for victory by such men as the Royal Marine whom I knew, damaged for life.
But 30 years on, the war looks to me like a last imperial hurrah.
A 60-minute documentary, The Falklands Legacy With Max Hastings, is available to view on the BBC iplayer until next Sunday evening.