Falklands Blogging!

In addition to being Treason-in-Defense of Slavery Month, this April is the heart of the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War. I’ll have more later this month about some naval aspects of the war, but there are a few cool bits about the war out there already:

• Mr. Trend casts a rather jaundiced eye toward the conflict and its effect in both Britain and Latin America
• An NYT article from Sunday details the effect that the conflict has had on the islanders themselves. Long story short, they’re plenty rich.
• David Axe discusses the incredible shrinking Royal Navy, which invariably brings to mind questions of how Britain would respond to renewed Argentine claims on the islands.
• Alex at Yorkshire Ranter, in pursuit of the noble end of clobbering Niall Ferguson, suggests that the primary obstacle to British victory in any renewed conflict would be the current British deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, he suspects that the British would prevail.
• Op-For is beginning what looks to be an interesting series on the war.

Regarding this last, I do have to take issue with this statement:

More importantly, the resolve and military capability displayed by Great Britain and her iron-willed Prime Minister, gave a critical boost to the NATO alliance and showed the Soviets that a Western power could and would fight to the finish, and could project power across the globe.

Indeed. Soviet military doctrine in the early 1980s was focused like a laser on the seizure of the Falklands Islands, and there’s no doubt that the Soviets were terrified by the prospect of two American client states slugging it out over a worthless piece of territory. Galtieri’s tendency to toss unconcious leftists out of airplanes at high altitude would have proven only a minor obstacle to the development of a Moscow-Buenos Aires axis that could have threatened, with the assistance of Ortega’s Nicaragua, to envelop all of Latin America. The British decision to defend the Falklands must rank somewhere between the defensive line of the 1985 Chicago Bears and the rise of Wham! in factors contributing to the collapse of Soviet power. I also liked this comment at Op-For:

I remember being stationed at Carswell AFB TX at the time of the Falklands war and how our morale shot up, cause the west was fighting back!

I must admit, there is something terribly amusing about envisioning Leopoldo Galtieri as Xerxes at Thermopylae. For much different reasons, it’s kind of entertaining to think of Maggie Thatcher as Leonidas…

More seriously, the former statement well represents the absurd wingnut commitment to “will”, and to the triumph of Green Lantern Theory. It’s unclear why the author believes that the Soviets would draw a lesson about Western resolve, instead of what appears to be the far more obvious lesson that the anti-communist world was divided and that, in the face of intra-Western conflict, the United States did little but dither.