Can we ever 'rejoice' in the War on Terror?
By Charles Moore
16/06/2007
The Telegraph
The British Army in action during the Falklands War against the Argentines, 1982
'What did you do in the Falklands war, Daddy?" I am sometimes asked. "Well, my dears," I say with pride, "I fought the war in Fleet Street."
"My regiment," I go on, "was The Daily Telegraph. Day after day, for seven hectic weeks, in conditions of extreme personal safety, I fired thousands and thousands of words at the enemy [the Foreign Office, the Tory Wets, Denis Healey, the BBC].
My comrades and I have no campaign medals to show for it - only books of yellowing cuttings - but we do not complain. We just feel glad to have done our bit, and to have lived to tell the tale." And then I modestly change the subject.
But this week, 25 years after the victory, the tale has been retold.
It seems justified to ransack the memory in order to understand where we have got to today.
The difference in the media between then and now is, in fact, the most striking point of all. There were only three television channels in Britain, and their technology was primitive (now, of course, there are 5 terrestial channels plus hundreds of Sky, cable or digital channels).
No journalist had a laptop or a mobile phone or any way of transmitting copy or pictures, unassisted by the authorities, from that remote theatre of war.
Only a handful of reporters was allowed to travel with the Task Force, and their copy was censored.
Back home, the BBC did its best to spread alarm and despondency, exaggerating disasters and affecting absolute neutrality between the British cause and the Argentine junta.
It was in exasperation at these attitudes when she announced the recapture of South Georgia, that Margaret Thatcher famously exclaimed, "Just rejoice at the news... Rejoice." It was good to hear her this week saying: "We should still rejoice."
But at sea, and during the fighting, the journalists, including excellent BBC men such as Brian Hanrahan, naturally and rightly sympathised with our troops. Their dispatches created a memorable myth - by which I mean not a lie, but a vivid narrative - that filled the national consciousness.
In the aftermath of victory, the reporters celebrated excessively in the pub in Port Stanley, the Upland Goose. One of them, a Scotsman with a grievance against Max Hastings, later the editor of this paper, for his brilliant, scene-stealing reports in the Evening Standard, allegedly threatened him with a bayonet. A brave Yorkshire journalist wrestled the Scot to the ground, shouting: "This is neither the time nor the place to kill Max Hastings." Quite right: Max's role in the triumph had been as significant as that of the Servicemen.
If a Falklands equivalent happened today, the cyber war would be as instant and in some ways as important as the real one. The media's "feral beasts", whom Tony Blair has just attacked after years of feasting with them, would make sure that text messages, emails, mobile phone calls and digital photographs were getting home faster than through the official channels. They would search at once for the scandalous and try to buy up the participants, even if they had behaved unheroically. The work of the myth-makers would be destructive.
And if the recent fiasco with the sailors and Marines captured by Iran is anything to go by, they would be abetted by the Ministry of Defence itself. Despite its immense logistic problems, the Falklands war was an oddly controllable operation. That cannot happen again.
What I remember most strongly from 1982 is how the Falklands crystallised change.
Among the ruling elites, there was an underlying pessimism, almost an assumption that we would lose. The Tory Cabinet ministers who had won MCs in the Second World War - Carrington, Pym, Whitelaw - were patriotic, of course. But bitter experience - the exhaustion of 1945, economic decline in the later decades and, above all, Suez - had put their minds in permanent reverse gear.
This was not true, famously, of Mrs Thatcher, whose whole mission since the debacle of the end of the Heath government had been to rescue the country from decline. Nor was it true of most of us who were young. In the bliss of ignorance, we tended to scorn diplomatic and organisational difficulty in favour of an adventure, justified by the unprovoked aggression against our country. Through no fault of our own, we turned out to be right.
And so it came about that a fight for 1,800 people 8,000 miles away over territory that did not matter in itself made a difference to everything. As Lady Thatcher put it this week: "The whole country knew it and felt it".
What had almost disappeared in Britain between 1945 and 1982 was the sense of possibility. After the Falklands, it opened up.
This was true on the world scene. The fact that Britain eventually won her struggle for American backing in the conflict allowed the Reagan/Thatcher partnership to become the most important of the era.
The Falklands victory came at a time when the Soviet Union was trying to work out whether the West had the will to resist. Although the battle in the South Atlantic had nothing to do with the Cold War, that question was now conclusively answered. By the end of the decade, it was the Russian will that had collapsed.
At home, the economic recovery - which had in reality begun before the Falklands war - quickly came to seem more obvious and more permanent. It would be ridiculous to argue that the Big Bang in the City was directly caused by the Falklands victory. But it is not ridiculous to suggest that the "enterprise culture" of the 1980s would not have appeared if the Falklands had ended with a whimper.
Without the Falklands, Arthur Scargill would have had a miners' strike earlier, before there were enough coal stocks, legal powers and political confidence to defeat him.
I would even argue that the Falklands victory opened up opportunity for women, although only one woman was important in it. In his new book (Haven't We Been Here Before?), John Nott, who was defence secretary at the time of the Falklands, says that all the men of his generation in politics would have found an escape, a face-saving way out of retaking the islands: "...she had a woman's courage" which allowed her to shut her mind to the range of horrifying possibilities and follow her instinct.
If a woman can win a war, what can she not do?
Immediately after my demanding campaign in Fleet Street, I felt I was entitled to a bit of R & R, but my editor cruelly gave me an even tougher assignment. Within a few days of the Falklands victory, Prince William was born. It fell to me, the most junior leader writer, to produce the paper's opinion on this happy event, in the form of a poem - the first and happily the last time that the column on the page opposite has broken into verse.
So our future King is almost exactly a Falklands child. Does that war mean anything long-lasting for the country over which he will reign? Is Lady Thatcher right that it provides a permanent example of the rewards of courage in the never-ending struggle against evil? Or was it an anomaly, a set of circumstances unimaginable in the modern world?
Actually, both could be true. Even at the time, the Falklands crisis seemed unbelievable, and it came almost without warning. Its importance is that it provided Britain with an astonishing test, which we passed.
Today, the test, set by everything that has happened since September 11, 2001, is more astonishing still. What is so fascinating is that no one yet knows whether we are passing it or not.
dailymail.co.uk
By Charles Moore
16/06/2007
The Telegraph
The British Army in action during the Falklands War against the Argentines, 1982
'What did you do in the Falklands war, Daddy?" I am sometimes asked. "Well, my dears," I say with pride, "I fought the war in Fleet Street."
"My regiment," I go on, "was The Daily Telegraph. Day after day, for seven hectic weeks, in conditions of extreme personal safety, I fired thousands and thousands of words at the enemy [the Foreign Office, the Tory Wets, Denis Healey, the BBC].
My comrades and I have no campaign medals to show for it - only books of yellowing cuttings - but we do not complain. We just feel glad to have done our bit, and to have lived to tell the tale." And then I modestly change the subject.
But this week, 25 years after the victory, the tale has been retold.
It seems justified to ransack the memory in order to understand where we have got to today.
The difference in the media between then and now is, in fact, the most striking point of all. There were only three television channels in Britain, and their technology was primitive (now, of course, there are 5 terrestial channels plus hundreds of Sky, cable or digital channels).
No journalist had a laptop or a mobile phone or any way of transmitting copy or pictures, unassisted by the authorities, from that remote theatre of war.
Only a handful of reporters was allowed to travel with the Task Force, and their copy was censored.
Back home, the BBC did its best to spread alarm and despondency, exaggerating disasters and affecting absolute neutrality between the British cause and the Argentine junta.
It was in exasperation at these attitudes when she announced the recapture of South Georgia, that Margaret Thatcher famously exclaimed, "Just rejoice at the news... Rejoice." It was good to hear her this week saying: "We should still rejoice."
But at sea, and during the fighting, the journalists, including excellent BBC men such as Brian Hanrahan, naturally and rightly sympathised with our troops. Their dispatches created a memorable myth - by which I mean not a lie, but a vivid narrative - that filled the national consciousness.
In the aftermath of victory, the reporters celebrated excessively in the pub in Port Stanley, the Upland Goose. One of them, a Scotsman with a grievance against Max Hastings, later the editor of this paper, for his brilliant, scene-stealing reports in the Evening Standard, allegedly threatened him with a bayonet. A brave Yorkshire journalist wrestled the Scot to the ground, shouting: "This is neither the time nor the place to kill Max Hastings." Quite right: Max's role in the triumph had been as significant as that of the Servicemen.
If a Falklands equivalent happened today, the cyber war would be as instant and in some ways as important as the real one. The media's "feral beasts", whom Tony Blair has just attacked after years of feasting with them, would make sure that text messages, emails, mobile phone calls and digital photographs were getting home faster than through the official channels. They would search at once for the scandalous and try to buy up the participants, even if they had behaved unheroically. The work of the myth-makers would be destructive.
And if the recent fiasco with the sailors and Marines captured by Iran is anything to go by, they would be abetted by the Ministry of Defence itself. Despite its immense logistic problems, the Falklands war was an oddly controllable operation. That cannot happen again.
What I remember most strongly from 1982 is how the Falklands crystallised change.
Among the ruling elites, there was an underlying pessimism, almost an assumption that we would lose. The Tory Cabinet ministers who had won MCs in the Second World War - Carrington, Pym, Whitelaw - were patriotic, of course. But bitter experience - the exhaustion of 1945, economic decline in the later decades and, above all, Suez - had put their minds in permanent reverse gear.
This was not true, famously, of Mrs Thatcher, whose whole mission since the debacle of the end of the Heath government had been to rescue the country from decline. Nor was it true of most of us who were young. In the bliss of ignorance, we tended to scorn diplomatic and organisational difficulty in favour of an adventure, justified by the unprovoked aggression against our country. Through no fault of our own, we turned out to be right.
And so it came about that a fight for 1,800 people 8,000 miles away over territory that did not matter in itself made a difference to everything. As Lady Thatcher put it this week: "The whole country knew it and felt it".
What had almost disappeared in Britain between 1945 and 1982 was the sense of possibility. After the Falklands, it opened up.
This was true on the world scene. The fact that Britain eventually won her struggle for American backing in the conflict allowed the Reagan/Thatcher partnership to become the most important of the era.
The Falklands victory came at a time when the Soviet Union was trying to work out whether the West had the will to resist. Although the battle in the South Atlantic had nothing to do with the Cold War, that question was now conclusively answered. By the end of the decade, it was the Russian will that had collapsed.
At home, the economic recovery - which had in reality begun before the Falklands war - quickly came to seem more obvious and more permanent. It would be ridiculous to argue that the Big Bang in the City was directly caused by the Falklands victory. But it is not ridiculous to suggest that the "enterprise culture" of the 1980s would not have appeared if the Falklands had ended with a whimper.
Without the Falklands, Arthur Scargill would have had a miners' strike earlier, before there were enough coal stocks, legal powers and political confidence to defeat him.
I would even argue that the Falklands victory opened up opportunity for women, although only one woman was important in it. In his new book (Haven't We Been Here Before?), John Nott, who was defence secretary at the time of the Falklands, says that all the men of his generation in politics would have found an escape, a face-saving way out of retaking the islands: "...she had a woman's courage" which allowed her to shut her mind to the range of horrifying possibilities and follow her instinct.
If a woman can win a war, what can she not do?
Immediately after my demanding campaign in Fleet Street, I felt I was entitled to a bit of R & R, but my editor cruelly gave me an even tougher assignment. Within a few days of the Falklands victory, Prince William was born. It fell to me, the most junior leader writer, to produce the paper's opinion on this happy event, in the form of a poem - the first and happily the last time that the column on the page opposite has broken into verse.
So our future King is almost exactly a Falklands child. Does that war mean anything long-lasting for the country over which he will reign? Is Lady Thatcher right that it provides a permanent example of the rewards of courage in the never-ending struggle against evil? Or was it an anomaly, a set of circumstances unimaginable in the modern world?
Actually, both could be true. Even at the time, the Falklands crisis seemed unbelievable, and it came almost without warning. Its importance is that it provided Britain with an astonishing test, which we passed.
Today, the test, set by everything that has happened since September 11, 2001, is more astonishing still. What is so fascinating is that no one yet knows whether we are passing it or not.
dailymail.co.uk