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'White House team is betraying Britain by staying neutral over Falklands'
By asserting its neutrality in the latest dispute over oil in the Falklands basin the US has handed Argentina a diplomatic victory, according to Lawrence Eagleburger, who helped to persuade President Reagan to throw American intelligence and logistical support into the war on Britain's side. He said that Britain's role alongside the US in Afghanistan since 2001 had only made the situation worse. "Under the circumstances, with Afghanistan, I can't see why we'd be doing anything other than being very pro-British because you are putting troops there," Mr Eagleburger told The Times in an interview in which he also recalled that Margaret Thatcher won over the Reagan Cabinet partly because "people were afraid to argue with her". To mark today's anniversary of the Falklands invasion President Kirchner of Argentina will walk to the edge of the Beagle Channel, on the southern tip of Patagonia, and sprinkle petals on the water in memory of the 649 Argentine soldiers and sailors who died in 74 days of fighting. The war claimed 255 British lives but it is in Argentina that the human cost of the war has remained a potent political weapon. Mrs Kirchner is expected to reassert Argentina's claim to sovereignty over the islands today at a ceremony in the world's southernmost city of Ushuaia, and to attack recent British efforts to develop oilfields in Falklands waters. In Buenos Aires a service will be held in the central Plaza de Mayo to highlight successive governments' neglect of war veterans since their defeat nearly three decades ago. America played a vital role in that defeat, not least by opening a US base on Ascension Island to British Forces, but its support was by no means a foregone conclusion. "There was a strong feeling that British control of the Falklands was anachronistic," Mr Eagleburger, 79, said, referring to public backing for Argentina from the Republican right but also to a pro-Argentina lobby in the US State Department that he was forced to confront. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, then the US Ambassador to the United Nations, was an ardent anti-communist who saw General Galtieri's junta as a bulwark against Soviet influence in Latin America -- and therefore to be supported in spite of its horrific human rights record. "But her biggest problem on the Falklands issue was that she was Irish," Mr Eagleburger said. "That really hung over her. She was not actively antagonistic but she was not anxious to smooth the way for the British in this or any other crisis." Mr Eagleburger, then the third-ranking official at the State Department, also had to face down Thomas Enders, the department's senior regional policymaker. Mr Enders was "very much an Anglophile" by inclination but as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America he had "figured out where his bread was buttered. I was p***ed off with him for wasting everyone's time because I knew damn well where Al Haig [the Secretary of State] was going to end up on this." Mr Haig, like Mr Reagan himself, was an admirer of Mrs Thatcher and a natural believer in a special Anglo-American relationship, hesitating only because of what came to be known as the Kirkpatrick doctrine of Soviet containment. In the end Mrs Thatcher prevailed by sheer force of personality. "The fact that she was Prime Minister made a great deal of difference in Washington if for no other reason than people were afraid to argue with her," Mr Eagleburger said. "The admiration for her was truly great. The disdain for Galtieri was pretty substantial, too, but she overwhelmed people in terms of her abilities and her willingness to express herself. Reagan had to come off the fence but from the very beginning he had an inherent sympathy for the British cause [and] he went to great lengths to help her." Twenty-eight years later David Cameron faces a more equivocal US Administration as a potential Conservative prime minister. In an interview this week he said that Britain should "frankly and candidly say we're disappointed" with Washington's call for negotiations on the Falklands' future even though the islanders do not want them. The Obama Administration's desire to stay neutral is not surprising, Mr Eagleburger said, but it should not have made neutrality the issue. "Both sides are now trying to force us to 'vote'," he said. "If Argentina knew we were pro-British it would be much easier for us to stay pro-British." Things were simpler in 1982, when he settled the argument with five words: "An ally is an ally." Posted by: Bulldog 2010-04-02 |
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