There is No Alternative (25 page)

For 150 years, the question of sovereignty over the Falklands had been one of those endless, low-level diplomatic conflicts of scant interest to anyone. Only weeks before the outbreak of hostilities, British and Argentinean delegates were negotiating placidly in New York and reporting their discussions to be of “cordial and positive spirit.” It is doubtful that at the time the conflict erupted, even one in ten Britons could have located the islands on a map. Britain achieved nothing, materially, by recapturing them. The Falklands victory was of moral and psychological import alone. This is not to diminish the moral and the psychological in history. Without this victory, it is unlikely that the Thatcher Revolution could have occurred—and without the Thatcher Revolution, Thatcher would not matter.

The significance of the Falklands War, Thatcher later wrote,

Certainly, Thatcher is correct to assert that Britain had come to be perceived as a nation lacking the will to defend its interests by force. The seizure of the Falklands is ample proof of this. To invade the sovereign territory of a nuclear power requires considerable confidence that your adversary has been psychologically neutered. Had those islands been claimed by the Soviet Union and continuously inhabited for 150 years by patriotic Russians, no Argentinean general, however fine he may have believed his nation's moral claim, would have dreamt of laying a hand upon them. It is no accident that the Japanese never asserted by force their claim to the Kuril Islands, which were in fact seized in 1945 by the Soviet Union and remain to this day in Russian hands.

That the low-simmering Falklands dispute became candescent offers a pointed lesson about the importance of unambiguous signaling as a deterrent to war. Prior to the invasion, the British government appeared to be telegraphing a certain indifference to the islands' fate. In 1981, facing the severe budgetary constraints imposed by Thatcher's insistence upon reducing public sector spending, Defense Minister John Nott recommended the withdrawal from the area of the Antarctic supply vessel
Endurance,
the symbol of Britain's commitment to the South Atlantic. Judging a massive conventional naval conflict unlikely in the coming decades, he also proposed—with Thatcher's approval—to scrap an aircraft carrier as well as two assault ships, and to reduce by one-third the number of British frigates and destroyers. In the same year, Parliament passed the British Nationality Act, which denied the islanders British citizenship. The measure was directed at another set of islanders who would have preferred to stay British, those of Hong Kong. The unintended consequence of the act's passage, however, was to suggest
that Britain was no more willing to go to war with Argentina than with China. It is fair to fault the Thatcher government for giving signals to the Argentineans that hinted of irresolution—although it is also fair to note, as Thatcher does, that no one expected them to do something quite so crazy. “Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we would always like to have acted differently,” she remarks. “So would the Argentineans.”
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If Thatcher's domestic political problems in the spring of 1982 were considerable, General Leopoldo Galtieri's were still worse. The Argentine junta, which since seizing power in a 1976 coup had presided over the disappearance of 30,000 of its citizens, faced a tempest in its tinpot: The nation was experiencing hyperinflation; in Buenos Aires, the largest anti-government demonstrations since the coup had prompted a crackdown. It is not surprising that under these circumstances Galtieri noted with fascination what appeared to be signals of a deteriorating British commitment to the Falklands. Nor is it surprising that he gambled that Britain would not respond militarily should he take the islands by force. He assumed this would lend him a magnificent propaganda coup with which to buttress his flagging political fortunes. So certain was he of this outcome that his military made no special plans to repel a British counterattack. Events, however, ran away with him, as events so often do. The invasion proved wildly popular in Argentina, so much so that when Thatcher proved dishearteningly
cojonuda
about keeping them, he could no longer retreat.

On March 19, 1982, a group of Argentine scrap metal merchants landed without permission on South Georgia, a dependent island to the southeast of the Falklands, and raised the Argentinean flag.
The offending flag was spotted by a British Antarctic Survey team. Having learned of the incident, Thatcher ordered the
Endurance,
with twenty-two marines on board, to sail to South Georgia to remove the scrap metal merchants. The Argentines sent one hundred troops to defend them. Outnumbered, the British forces held fire, watching the Argentines warily. Thatcher was unnerved by this turn of events but decided it was an “awkward incident,” rather than a “precursor to conflict.”
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She was wrong. On March 30, she received word that the Argentine fleet was steaming toward Stanley, the capital of the Falklands.

The official defeatism of the Ministry of Defense, Thatcher writes, was contradicted by the lone voice of the chief of the naval staff, Sir Henry Leach, who told Thatcher in the same meeting that he could have a task force ready to sail within forty-eight hours. “He believed such a force could retake the islands. All he needed was my authority to begin to assemble it. I gave it him, and he left immediately to set the work in hand.”
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It is not surprising that the prime minister ordered him to assemble the task force. Of course she wished to keep every option open. What is surprising is that she used it. The pessimistic view offered by the Ministry of Defense was grounded in a cold reality: The British navy in the early 1980s was not prepared for a major naval battle in the South Atlantic. It was designed to fight, in concert with NATO, against the Soviet Union in the North Atlantic. It was chiefly an anti-submarine force, ill-equipped for conventional surface warfare or amphibious landings. The British would be fighting with minimal air cover and no missile defense shield. The Argentinean navy, on the other hand, was the best in South America. It had for years been preparing for just this kind of battle with Brazil or Chile. The Argentineans enjoyed a tremendous superiority in aircraft and a three-to-one advantage in ground troops. They could sortie land-based aircraft armed with French Exocet missiles. And they did not have to sail 8,000 miles to reach the combat zone.

The British were perfectly right to declare the invasion an outrage. The basis of the Argentinean claim to the islands was geographic proximity. Since every nation is proximate to another, this is a principle that, if broadly applied, would lead immediately to international anarchy. The British could appeal to a point of much greater relevance, both morally and in international law: The Falkland Islanders did not want to be Argentineans, and this was no mere point of ethnic pride, for the Argentinean regime had an unenviable reputation for throwing dissenters from airplanes into shark-infested waters.

However valid the British case, it is easy to understand why prudent minds in the British government hesitated. If it was humiliating to see the Falklands seized by force, losing a war to Argentina would have been vastly more humiliating. Losing a war to Argentina was a very real possibility.

On April 2, as predicted, the Argentinean task force overran the Falklands. After a brief firefight, the symbolic garrison of eighty British marines surrendered. Photographs of the marines, face-down on the ground, appeared later that day in the British press.

The Argentinean troops reportedly were taken aback to discover that the islanders spoke English and did not welcome them as liberators, but the invaders adjusted quickly to the paradigm shift. Using language that appears to have been inspired by the novels of Graham Greene, they proceeded to issue a series of minatory communiqués to the islanders:

Some liberation.

On the following day, for the first time since the 1956 Suez crisis, the House of Commons was recalled for a special Saturday sitting. Thatcher addressed a furious, jeering Parliament. The fury was not only with Argentina, but with the prime minister for having failed to deter the attack.

It is worth listening to Thatcher's speech and her response to the ensuing hostile interrogatory, a session she subsequently described as the most difficult of her career. Manuals on self-defense often suggest that if an adversary's face is red, he poses no immediate threat; a white face, on the other hand, implies that blood has been diverted to the muscles, so watch out: Violence is imminent. If ever a voice can be described as white-faced, it was Thatcher's on that day.
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This is a voice of cold, controlled, and genuine fury.