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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 25, 1982
PAGE 13
ment to seek appropriate pictures that she needed for her walls.
She was quite precise.
She wanted paintings of Lord Nelson
brought� Downing Street. They were. She hung them. And when
the Amer1can team of diplomats headed by Mr. Al Haig came to
Downing Street to discuss peace plans, she took them first to
look at those pictures.
"Before we talk," she said, lapsing into an unfamiliar tough
Americanism, "I want you� to look at these." The message was
clear. No wonder Mr. Haig told the Argentine negotiators when he
went on to Buenos Aires that if they chose to take her on, they
would be facing a formidable foe. "You haven't had to deal with
her," he said. "I have."
But if Mrs. Thatcher...has now arrived at the climax of victory,
this is where her real test begins. She has won the war. Winning
the peace is going to be much, much harder. Again, many will try
to distract her •...There will be much talk of the need not to
humiliate the Argentines, to consider their honour.
She will
have to pick her way through this insidious minefield of compro
mise and appeasement. Mrs. Thatcher's instincts will tell her
that the Argentines must not be allowed to get away with any
thing.
No self-delusion. No "moral" victories. No talk of
honour to cover a richly deserved defeat. She saw them correctly
at the beginning as international lawbreakers. And her instincts
are not those of the soft do-gooder which favours the trans
gressor over the victim.
Guess what nation is going to lean heaviest on Britain to help restore
Argentina's injured pride? The same nation that urged Britain to be "mag
nanimous in victory." You guessed it. Good ol' soft-headed Uncle Sam.
Journalist William Pfaff, writing from Paris in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD
TRIBUNE, in his June 10 article "Argentina Takes an English Lesson," shows
why this would be the wrong course to take:
Much has been made of saving Argentina's pride as the Falklands
affair ends. It might be better for Argentina that its pride not
be spared. To spare its pride is to spare its illusions and
Argentina has too many of those. The United States government is
the leader in this attempt to allow Argentina to escape the con
sequences of its attack upon the Falkland Islands and its attempt
to annex them. It is possible to think that the United States
itself is the victim of illusions about Argentina"and its impor
tance to the United States, and to the West.
The only constructive purpose this war can serve is to teach
reality--that actions have consequences and things must be
earned. It is this lesson that the Reagan Administration, out of
muddled good intentions, would spare the Argentines, thus making
the Falklands affair truly meaningless....
What has happened in [Argentina] is genuinely disturbing because
a divorce from reality has been apparent from the start. The
government has said, and the people enthusiastically have agreed,
that actions do not have consequences, words suffice to sink
ships, to claim victories is to have them•.•every soldier will