They Never Learn

Four decades after the triumphant conclusion of Margaret Thatcher's most famous party political broadcast, the beastly Argies still haven't worked out who won. The enemy's foreign minister complains that Britain's treatment of Argentina resembles that normally reserved for countries in breach of human rights, and he even has the gall to point out that negotiations over the status of the Falklands were in progress at the time of the invasion. It seems that people can still be surprised, provided they live in a different hemisphere, that Her Majesty's Government would be more willing to compromise with a military dictatorship than with a forty-year-old democracy. Although the Falkland Islanders' desire to remain British has been repeatedly affirmed with North Korean levels of unanimity, the idea of the master race taking human rights into account is nearly as quaint as the idea that it might have some interest in soiling its second-best war nostalgia by negotiating with greasy foreigners.