Saturday
(0)I have liked many of Mark Steyn's articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq's Ba'athist regime.
Why would anybody think, faced with economic catastrophe, that invading a string of distant islands is the answer? Dictators don't behave rationally. Indeed, one reason they become dictators is precisely to escape the tiresome constraints of rationality. There may be valid arguments for not going to war with Iraq, but not the ones that begin, oh, even if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he'd never use them against the West. Never bet on a dictator's rationality.
This is Steyn at his best... read the whole article!
The Steyn article doesn't quite jibe with my perception of the Falklands war. At the time I was part of a USMC Reserve air group which included a squadron of A-4's while the active duty Marine Corps was replacing that aircraft with the AV-8. Since these aircraft were facing each other in the Falkilands. we were watching the war with intense professional interest. While the ship-to-ship war was never in question and the Argentine land forces aquitted themselves as honorably as the Italians in North Africa, the land-based Argentine A-4's could reach the battle area and, together with Exocets, made the war a near run thing. British military virtue won that war but victory was not inevitable. Iraq, on the other hand. . ..
Posted by Lou Gots at January 27, 2003 09:10 PM
