April/May 1982 - Falklands/Malvinas LIHOP?

[SHERITON HOTEL]

[LIHOP = Let It Happen On Purpose - ed.]

I don't have any fresh information about the Falklands/Malvinas war but was just wondering how British intelligence missed the Argentine armada massing in their coastal ports at the time, especially as Argentina made no secret of their claim to the islands and intention to retake them. The Thatcher government, I understand, had withdrawn naval cover in the South Atlantic and changed the status of British commonwealth citizens giving the Galtieri regime inviting signals, Thatcher like the Bush regime greatly benefited from the conflict but in her defence , I've never seen someone bricking it so much on TV when the news came out.

[karlos]

The Conservative party historically have not been a party of war in the same way as the Labour party has.
Clearly Thatcher did not expect for us to be attacked and quite rightly was surprised.
But thankfully we liberated the Falklands without too much bloodshed and atrocities.
Contrast that with Blair's colonial unprovoked wars of agression and genocide against sevral countries. Not forgetting the diamond raid in Sierra Leone and the Depleted Uranium bombing of Serbia.
A million dead Iraqis and a land contaminated for thousands of years.
Contrast that with Thatcher who avoided launching an offensive against Argentina and merely attacked the occupying forces with a minimum of fatalities.
There was no torturing of captured Argentine soldiers.
There was no hooding and shackling and holding for years without trial.

The liberation of the Falklands was a just war.
The invasion and genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan are war crimes.
Never muddy the water.

[SHERITON HOTEL]

Yeah yeah, but isn't prevention better than cure? wouldn't it have been better if like the previous minority labour administration the tories had maintained the naval patrols round the Falklands/Malvinas?

I recall Thatch aiding Reagan in a terrorist strike against Gadaffi in Tripoli while the French rightly wouldn't allow US bombers use of French airspace after their launch in the UK on their murderous illegal mission,She was a hawk in the first Gulf war against her former ali Saddam and, of course, she ordered the sinking of the Belgrano outside the exclusion zone infamously celebrated in that filthy Murdoch rag and tory propaganda organ with the headline GOTCHA!.

Tony Bliar....Labour, Socialist? is this a joke?

[chek]

As ever, there is more going on than karlos/stelios single-prism view of everything would have us believe.

First thing to appreciate is that there is no singular unitary dominant guiding power, but rather a series of factions and alliances that slither in and out of the spotlight circle of Global Power in an ever changing kaleidoscope as the factions' internal values change to suit their perceptions of what their own best interests are in an ever changing world, together with existing machinery already in motion. Think minefield.

So in March 1982, when the miltary junta running Argentina saw an opportunity with the withdrawal of a major portion of the British South Atlantic presence (the Endurance) it was perceived by them (alone) as a strategic signal, because they direly needed an external prop to buck up their failing economy and demoralised population. And so - claiming historical precedent as is usual with these things - they invaded with reported mass popular support.

In reality it was of course caused merely by a cost-cutting exercise by the busy little monetarist bees in the UK Treasury, busily stripping the government expenditure component of the GDP to double-plus prove the folly of (previous) socialism, and who couldn't see beyond the end of their annual balance sheets.

If it had happened in this decade, the Argentines would have no doubt prevailed and some convoluted excuse would have been devised for why they should.

However, unfortunately for them, in the 1980's the UK had available an operational strategic component of its airborne nuclear deterrent still active, which may or may not (but provenly could) nuke Buenos Aires, and in addition a Royal Navy designed to and strong enough to contain - or at least seriously challenge - the Russian threat to the Iceland gap and beyond.

The relevance of this is that the Royal Navy's Polaris (and now latterly Trident) submarine-bourne nuclear deterrent was operated by what is called a 'dual key' arrangement, meaning it requires explicit US approval before launch. Whereas the run-down but still existing remains of the V-Force, as demonstrated by the Vulcan that bombed the runway at Port Stanley, was wholly independent. Those 'Black Buck' Vulcan missions whose actual total results could have been achieved with a two Harrier jet strike were actually a signal to Galtieri of the Unthinkable comin'-a-knockin' if he continued.

In short, the UK didn't fold in the game of diplomacy poker, and as an added but wholly un-envisaged benefit, the Argentine military junta couldn't withstand the shame of its thwarted imperial adventure and instead folded itself shortly afterwards.

While the overall outcome may well have been heartening in retrospect (a civilian government is alway preferable to a military one), it should also be remembered that without support from the fascist Pinochet in Chile (hence Thatcher and her minions' later support for him in his hour of need) none of it may have played out as the planners in London hoped or intended.

We may know what really happened about 2050 or so.

[paul wright]

As I recall on the basis of distant memory, the US and Argentine Navies had been holding joint exercises in the months previous to the Falklands conflict.
Much as with Saddam and Kuwait, the Argentinian admirals had been tipped the nudge and the wink by the Americans that Britain wouldn't do much if the Argentinians claimed their Malvinas physically. And the dupes went along with this
This was a contrived war aimed at saving Thatcher's ass. She was very unpopular when this war came out of the blue.
She needed to destroy traditional British values in order to open up the progress towards the NWO
The conflict was a deadly messy and constructed affair with an outcome never in doubt
A solid trigger for the destruction of the UK and the establishment of a servile service state via Blairism and the presently collapsing Brown-mediated state of affairs
As I recall it many UK servicemen were killed or seriously burned when a French Exocet missile hit a British ship, while hundreds of Argentinian sailors died when a retreating Argentinian vessel was sunk to the tune of Murdoch's Sun's "Gotcha"
This was a sick murderous contrivance in line with what we have seen since

[wepmob2000]

The outcome was never a foregone conclusion until the British had secured the landing grounds on the islands. If there had been a major disaster, for example the Argentine Exocets had hit their intended targets (the Canberra and Invincible), there would have been no way the British could have retaken the Falklands in the short term. A pretty risky stratagem to save political disaster I think.

What would have happened to Maggie's popularity if there had been a military disaster? Was the Conservative upsurge in popularity due to having won the war, or due to the war having been won at fairly low cost?

I have read suggestions however that the Admiralty was complicit in the decision to withdraw Endurance, maybe in the hope of an Argentine invasion? At a time when defence cuts were primarily hitting the Navy the hardest, maybe the Lordships felt this was the best way to prove the worth of the Navy? If that was the case it certainly worked, for example the sale of Invincible to Australia was cancelled in the aftermath of the war.

[paul wright]

[wepmob2000]

That all depends on whether you think the Conservatives would have been able to get re-elected after a long, drawn out, and bloody war? The government was prepared to accept 10,000 British casualties, would the electorate have found this so appealing? If you consider British resources to fight a conventional war 8,000 miles away, at that time, it was incredibly risky. As it was ships like the Sheffield were sacrificed because our forces had no answer to Exocet.

[paul wright]

Dont try and engage me. This was all a little contrivance with disastrous consequences.As mote it be. It wasn't to be anything other.There is no dispute here. It turned out in the way as intended. Don't try and pretend there were variables.It was all part of the Thatcherite plot which ended when she wouldn't go along with the EU. Simple as that. End

[wepmob2000]

[TonyGosling]

Feel free to engage with the rest of us.

[CheshireOake]

Looks like LIHOP to me!

Imagine how different the 80s could have been if the Falklands/Malvinas war had never happened........

[SHERITON HOTEL]

[CheshireOake]

Some people on the left say the Falklands war was about oil - but if so - where's the oil now, 25 years after the war?

[blackcat]

Now that it is over $100 a barrel and North Sea oil is running out perhaps we will soon find out. Don't forget during most of the last 25 years oil has been relatively cheap and was less than $10 a barrel for quite a while, after the peak of over $30 a barrel in the early eighties. In fact at $100 a barrel it is about the same as it was 25 years ago allowing for inflation. It has not been necessary nor economical to exploit KNOWN reserves in the south Atlantic - until now.

[TonyGosling]

'Intellect failure permanent feature of UK govt'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-5-XIXj2tA

Link

It's exactly three decades after the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano was sunk in the first major British attack of the Falklands war. RT sits down with historian and author Hugh Bicheno to discuss whether the conflict was worth it

Razor’s Edge: the Unofficial History of the Falklands War
‘It may seem impossible for anything original to appear about the Falklands War of 1982, so much has been written about it, but Hugh Bicheno’s book is that thing. His depiction of the origins and direction of the war is exhilaratingly politically incorrect . . . and whether they agree or not, readers will find this book gripping and discomfiting.’
John Keegan, Daily Telegraph
http://www.hughbicheno.co.uk/razors.html

‘Readers will by now perceive that Bicheno is not a mincer of words. He spares nobody. . . But he knows his stuff about how soldiers fight battles, and he has done us all a service by explaining them so well for a new generation.’
Max Hastings, Daily Mail

The working title was ‘Guilt, Complicity and Shame’, which ended up being early chapter titles. I was an intelligence officer posted at the Buenos Aires embassy during the 1970s and knew very well that the war came about because of the cowardly bad faith of the policy pursued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) under successive British governments, from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher inclusive. Anticipating that the announced ‘Official History’ would continue the process of whitewashing begun by the shameless Franks Report of 1983, I decided to tell it like it was. Although the old lie about an ‘intelligence failure’ still circulates, it has been a source of pride to me to note that since Razor’s Edge was published the politicians who for twenty-five years sheltered behind the falsehood began to admit that they were better informed than they thought it convenient to mention when events were still fresh in the public mind.

It was also an outstanding epic of arms and I was surprised to discover that nobody had thought to marry the many published accounts by British and Argentine participants. In Buenos Aires I had shared an office with an FCO colleague, Howard Pearce, probably the most honest man I have ever known. Fortuitously his last posting was as Governor of the Falkland Islands, which gave me another good reason to visit the islands. The happy occasion of his marriage later in 2003 led to a return visit, and as a result I was able to explore the battlefields in great detail and to assemble the mosaic of participants’ recollections on the framework of the eloquent terrain.