Senate Member
Posts: 6,112 
April 17th, 2008, 01:01 PM
Britain was the world's greatest power before WWII, with a gargantuan empire, the largest the world has ever known and which was at its greatest-ever extent in 1922 under King George VI.
After WWII, despite winning that war, Britain never fully recovered from the damages it sustained during that titanic struggle - and also gave independence to many of its colonies.
But then, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female Prime Minister. Thanks to her, Britain defeated a despotic Argentinian dictatorship in 1982 which invaded British land (Britain's victory in this war helped bring an end to the ruling military junta of Argentina) and, alongside Ronald Reagan, helped to win the Cold War for the West.
It was Thatcher that helped Britain reclaim its status as a world power again...
Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands
By Con Coughlin
17/04/2008
Daily Mail
It was a minor skirmish in a remote part of the world, but Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in liberating the Falkland Islands in 1982 set the seal on Britain reclaiming its status as a major world power..
You have only to look at the crucial role British forces play today on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to grasp the significance of the legacy Margaret Thatcher created with her momentous victory in the Falklands in 1982.
Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev
Now it is almost taken for granted that Britain will be a key player in tackling the big issues of the day, whether it is waging war on Islamist militants in the Middle East and beyond, guaranteeing Kosovan independence or eradicating child poverty in Africa.
But the revival of Britain’s status as a major world major power can be traced back directly to that bleak morning on March 19, 1982 when a group of Argentine scrap metal merchants hoisted their national flag on the remote British colonial outpost of South Georgia in the Falkland Islands.
When the Argentine dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri ordered his forces to invade the Falkland Islands the following month, he did so believing that Britain neither had the strength nor the will-power to defend the interests of a remote collection of sparsely-populated islands located eight thousand miles away in the South Atlantic.
But he had not reckoned on Margaret Thatcher’s steely determination who, despite the reservations expressed by senior military commanders and the Foreign Office – not to mention her own Cabinet – insisted on assembling a naval Task Force to rescue the beleaguered 1,800 islanders.
British soldiers taking on the Argentines during the Battle for Tumbledown Hill in 1982 during the Falklands War
The British celebrate their victory in the Battle of Tumbledown Hill
The military campaign to liberate the Falklands was a close run thing. The bravery demonstrated by Argentine air force pilots posed a significant threat to the Royal Navy throughout the conflict, and the Argentine conscripts who had been dispatched to the occupy the islands put up stiff resistance.
British warship HMS Sheffield after being struck by an Argentine missile during the Falklands War, 1982. Britain defeated Argentina in the war.
Although British forces ultimately prevailed, victory was by no means a certainty from the outset, and the two months between the Task Force leaving Britain and victory being proclaimed at Port Stanley on June 14 placed Margaret Thatcher under enormous pressure and provided the sternest test of her qualities as a leader since she took office.
The liberation of the Falklands, which came at the cost of 258 British fatalities and the loss of a number of Royal Navy vessels, was a personal triumph for Margaret Thatcher and would prove to be the defining moment of her premiership.
Argentine POWs captured by the British during the Falklands War in 1982. The British took 11,313 Argentine soldiers prisoner, whereas the Argentines captured just 115 British soldiers. The war was a decisive British victory, with 258 British soldiers killed and 649 Argentine soldiers killed. 777 British were wounded and 1068 Argentines were wounded. Britain's victory brought to an end Argentina's rulung military junta.
Not only did victory give her the courage and self-confidence to tackle pressing domestic issues such as the challenge posed to the government’s authority posed by militant trades unions, it restored Britain’s post-war status as a major world power.
Whether it was confronting the Soviet Union or taking on the EU’s Brussels bureaucracy, British interests and British concerns could no longer be ignored.
Today, with Britain’s armed forces stretched to breaking point by their current commitments to the world’s various war zones, it’s difficult to comprehend that when Margaret Thatcher came to office in May 1979 Britain had become a second rate power whose voice hardly countered for anything in the inner counsels of world affairs.
Britain’s world view still seemed to be defined by the humiliating remark made by John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez crisis, that “Britain had lost an empire, but not yet found a role”.
Margaret Thatcher’s election victory aside, the year 1979 will be remembered as an epoch-making moment in the development of the modern world.
A year that began with a radical Islamic government taking power in Teheran ended with the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan.
In between American President Jimmy Carter had helped negotiate the flawed Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel which, though ending hostilities between Jerusalem and Cairo, made no serious attempt to address the plight of the Palestinians, an omission that continues to haunt us to this day.
But Britain’s role in all of these momentous events was that of a helpless bystander, impotently watching as events spiralled out of control.
In Iran British officials were so complacent that they failed to predict the radicalisation of the country’s clergy would result in the overthrow of a key pro-Western ally, while the British government’s protests at the Soviets’ usurpation of Afghan sovereignty hardly registered at the Kremlin.
A country whose economy was in melt-down and where the government was battling to assert its own authority was hardly going to be in a position to disrupt Moscow’s audacious land grab in Central Asia.
While Margaret Thatcher’s foremost priority on coming to power was, understandably, tackling Britain’s union-ravaged economy, there were nevertheless a number of opportunities that allowed her to demonstrate the uncompromising, robust approach to international crises that would later define her “Iron Lady” persona.
When, in April 1980, terrorists seized control of the Iranian embassy in London and took the occupants hostage, Margaret Thatcher had no hesitation in ordering the SAS into action.
The dramatic rescue operation, which was broadcast on television around the world, where balaclava-wearing SAS officers stormed the embassy building and rescued the hostages while killing most of the terrorists, immediately had the effect of raising Britain’s reputation around the world as a country not to be trifled with.
The other crisis of the early 1980s that cemented Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as a conviction politician was the IRA hunger strikes in Northern Ireland during which a group of hard-core Irish prisoners led by Bobby Sands starved themselves to death.
The protest was aimed at putting pressure on the British government to give political status to IRA activists who had been jailed for terrorist offences.
Margaret Thatcher came under enormous international pressure to make concessions to the IRA, but she remained true to her philosophy of not giving in to the demands of people she regarded as terrorists, and the IRA was eventually forced to call off the hunger strikes by the distraught families of the hunger strikers. But not before ten IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death.
If Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as a resolute and combative politician was built by her early approach to domestic and international issues, it was sealed by her stunning triumph in liberating the Falkland Islands in the summer of 1982, a victory that would provide her with the platform to dominate the world stage for the rest of the decade.
But while many of her supporters regard the Falklands as her finest hour, it was her long-running ideological battle, and ultimate triumph, with the Soviet Union that will define her premiership as one of the greatest of the modern age, on a par with that of Winston Churchill.
It was Margaret Thatcher’s immense good fortune that soon after she entered power she found herself with a political soul mate and close personal friend in residence at the White House.
Ronald Reagan had met Margaret Thatcher on several occasions before entering the White House in 1981 when he had previously served as California’s Republican governor.
According to Charles Powell, who worked as her foreign policy guru in Downing Street throughout most of the 1980s, they shared the same view that the detente espoused by Henry Kissinger during the 1970s had not succeeded in reducing the threat posed by the Soviet Union and hardline communist ideology.
“Thatcher and Reagan wanted to defeat the Soviets, not tolerate them. In that respect the greatest news she had as prime minister was when Ronald Reagan was elected president,” explained Lord Powell.
As soon as Reagan was firmly established at the White House the two leaders embarked on a policy of improving the West’s defensive capabilities, the most obvious manifestation of which in Britain was the deployment of nuclear-armed Cruise missiles at military bases around the country, which provoked widespread protests at places such as the RAF base at Greenham Common.
As well as supporting an upgrade in the West’s military capability, Margaret Thatcher also personally spearheaded a campaign to open a dialogue with more moderate members of the Soviet politbureau, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who was invited for talks at Downing Street in 1984.
As she later remarked of the man who would oversee the dismantling of the Iron Curtain after he became Soviet president the following year, “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
In return the Soviet military paper “Red Star” paid her the ultimate compliment by dubbing her the “Iron Lady”.
The collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 was the direct result of the twin strategy adopted by Reagan and Thatcher, namely demonstrating the West’s military supremacy over the Soviet Union, while at the same time offering an olive branch to moderate politbureau members who realised the days of the “Evil Empire” were drawing to a close.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union represented a stunning triumph for the Western democracies, equal to the Allies’ victory in the Second World War in terms of the effect it had on redrawing Europe’s ideological map.
And the central role Margaret Thatcher played in achieving a famous victory ensured that Britain could call itself great once more.
telegraph.co.uk
Britain was the world's greatest power before WWII, with a gargantuan empire, the largest the world has ever known and which was at its greatest-ever extent in 1922 under King George VI.
After WWII, despite winning that war, Britain never fully recovered from the damages it sustained during that titanic struggle - and also gave independence to many of its colonies.
But then, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female Prime Minister. Thanks to her, Britain defeated a despotic Argentinian dictatorship in 1982 which invaded British land (Britain's victory in this war helped bring an end to the ruling military junta of Argentina) and, alongside Ronald Reagan, helped to win the Cold War for the West.
It was Thatcher that helped Britain reclaim its status as a world power again...
Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands
By Con Coughlin
17/04/2008
Daily Mail
It was a minor skirmish in a remote part of the world, but Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in liberating the Falkland Islands in 1982 set the seal on Britain reclaiming its status as a major world power..
You have only to look at the crucial role British forces play today on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to grasp the significance of the legacy Margaret Thatcher created with her momentous victory in the Falklands in 1982.
Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev
Now it is almost taken for granted that Britain will be a key player in tackling the big issues of the day, whether it is waging war on Islamist militants in the Middle East and beyond, guaranteeing Kosovan independence or eradicating child poverty in Africa.
But the revival of Britain’s status as a major world major power can be traced back directly to that bleak morning on March 19, 1982 when a group of Argentine scrap metal merchants hoisted their national flag on the remote British colonial outpost of South Georgia in the Falkland Islands.
When the Argentine dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri ordered his forces to invade the Falkland Islands the following month, he did so believing that Britain neither had the strength nor the will-power to defend the interests of a remote collection of sparsely-populated islands located eight thousand miles away in the South Atlantic.
But he had not reckoned on Margaret Thatcher’s steely determination who, despite the reservations expressed by senior military commanders and the Foreign Office – not to mention her own Cabinet – insisted on assembling a naval Task Force to rescue the beleaguered 1,800 islanders.
British soldiers taking on the Argentines during the Battle for Tumbledown Hill in 1982 during the Falklands War
The British celebrate their victory in the Battle of Tumbledown Hill
The military campaign to liberate the Falklands was a close run thing. The bravery demonstrated by Argentine air force pilots posed a significant threat to the Royal Navy throughout the conflict, and the Argentine conscripts who had been dispatched to the occupy the islands put up stiff resistance.
British warship HMS Sheffield after being struck by an Argentine missile during the Falklands War, 1982. Britain defeated Argentina in the war.
Although British forces ultimately prevailed, victory was by no means a certainty from the outset, and the two months between the Task Force leaving Britain and victory being proclaimed at Port Stanley on June 14 placed Margaret Thatcher under enormous pressure and provided the sternest test of her qualities as a leader since she took office.
The liberation of the Falklands, which came at the cost of 258 British fatalities and the loss of a number of Royal Navy vessels, was a personal triumph for Margaret Thatcher and would prove to be the defining moment of her premiership.
Argentine POWs captured by the British during the Falklands War in 1982. The British took 11,313 Argentine soldiers prisoner, whereas the Argentines captured just 115 British soldiers. The war was a decisive British victory, with 258 British soldiers killed and 649 Argentine soldiers killed. 777 British were wounded and 1068 Argentines were wounded. Britain's victory brought to an end Argentina's rulung military junta.
Not only did victory give her the courage and self-confidence to tackle pressing domestic issues such as the challenge posed to the government’s authority posed by militant trades unions, it restored Britain’s post-war status as a major world power.
Whether it was confronting the Soviet Union or taking on the EU’s Brussels bureaucracy, British interests and British concerns could no longer be ignored.
Today, with Britain’s armed forces stretched to breaking point by their current commitments to the world’s various war zones, it’s difficult to comprehend that when Margaret Thatcher came to office in May 1979 Britain had become a second rate power whose voice hardly countered for anything in the inner counsels of world affairs.
Britain’s world view still seemed to be defined by the humiliating remark made by John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez crisis, that “Britain had lost an empire, but not yet found a role”.
Margaret Thatcher’s election victory aside, the year 1979 will be remembered as an epoch-making moment in the development of the modern world.
A year that began with a radical Islamic government taking power in Teheran ended with the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan.
In between American President Jimmy Carter had helped negotiate the flawed Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel which, though ending hostilities between Jerusalem and Cairo, made no serious attempt to address the plight of the Palestinians, an omission that continues to haunt us to this day.
But Britain’s role in all of these momentous events was that of a helpless bystander, impotently watching as events spiralled out of control.
In Iran British officials were so complacent that they failed to predict the radicalisation of the country’s clergy would result in the overthrow of a key pro-Western ally, while the British government’s protests at the Soviets’ usurpation of Afghan sovereignty hardly registered at the Kremlin.
A country whose economy was in melt-down and where the government was battling to assert its own authority was hardly going to be in a position to disrupt Moscow’s audacious land grab in Central Asia.
While Margaret Thatcher’s foremost priority on coming to power was, understandably, tackling Britain’s union-ravaged economy, there were nevertheless a number of opportunities that allowed her to demonstrate the uncompromising, robust approach to international crises that would later define her “Iron Lady” persona.
When, in April 1980, terrorists seized control of the Iranian embassy in London and took the occupants hostage, Margaret Thatcher had no hesitation in ordering the SAS into action.
The dramatic rescue operation, which was broadcast on television around the world, where balaclava-wearing SAS officers stormed the embassy building and rescued the hostages while killing most of the terrorists, immediately had the effect of raising Britain’s reputation around the world as a country not to be trifled with.
The other crisis of the early 1980s that cemented Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as a conviction politician was the IRA hunger strikes in Northern Ireland during which a group of hard-core Irish prisoners led by Bobby Sands starved themselves to death.
The protest was aimed at putting pressure on the British government to give political status to IRA activists who had been jailed for terrorist offences.
Margaret Thatcher came under enormous international pressure to make concessions to the IRA, but she remained true to her philosophy of not giving in to the demands of people she regarded as terrorists, and the IRA was eventually forced to call off the hunger strikes by the distraught families of the hunger strikers. But not before ten IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death.
If Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as a resolute and combative politician was built by her early approach to domestic and international issues, it was sealed by her stunning triumph in liberating the Falkland Islands in the summer of 1982, a victory that would provide her with the platform to dominate the world stage for the rest of the decade.
But while many of her supporters regard the Falklands as her finest hour, it was her long-running ideological battle, and ultimate triumph, with the Soviet Union that will define her premiership as one of the greatest of the modern age, on a par with that of Winston Churchill.
It was Margaret Thatcher’s immense good fortune that soon after she entered power she found herself with a political soul mate and close personal friend in residence at the White House.
Ronald Reagan had met Margaret Thatcher on several occasions before entering the White House in 1981 when he had previously served as California’s Republican governor.
According to Charles Powell, who worked as her foreign policy guru in Downing Street throughout most of the 1980s, they shared the same view that the detente espoused by Henry Kissinger during the 1970s had not succeeded in reducing the threat posed by the Soviet Union and hardline communist ideology.
“Thatcher and Reagan wanted to defeat the Soviets, not tolerate them. In that respect the greatest news she had as prime minister was when Ronald Reagan was elected president,” explained Lord Powell.
As soon as Reagan was firmly established at the White House the two leaders embarked on a policy of improving the West’s defensive capabilities, the most obvious manifestation of which in Britain was the deployment of nuclear-armed Cruise missiles at military bases around the country, which provoked widespread protests at places such as the RAF base at Greenham Common.
As well as supporting an upgrade in the West’s military capability, Margaret Thatcher also personally spearheaded a campaign to open a dialogue with more moderate members of the Soviet politbureau, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who was invited for talks at Downing Street in 1984.
As she later remarked of the man who would oversee the dismantling of the Iron Curtain after he became Soviet president the following year, “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
In return the Soviet military paper “Red Star” paid her the ultimate compliment by dubbing her the “Iron Lady”.
The collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 was the direct result of the twin strategy adopted by Reagan and Thatcher, namely demonstrating the West’s military supremacy over the Soviet Union, while at the same time offering an olive branch to moderate politbureau members who realised the days of the “Evil Empire” were drawing to a close.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union represented a stunning triumph for the Western democracies, equal to the Allies’ victory in the Second World War in terms of the effect it had on redrawing Europe’s ideological map.
And the central role Margaret Thatcher played in achieving a famous victory ensured that Britain could call itself great once more.
telegraph.co.uk
