The Pardoner's Tale

Simon Jenkins

It is an honour to you to have found A pardoner with his credentials sound Who can absolve you as you ply the spur

In any accident that may occur.' (Canterbury Tales: Coghill trans.) Wars always seem such distant affairs and the Falklands war is already tak- ing on the patina of Omdurman and Ala- mein. Yet in March of last year, the Argen- tinian leadership was contemplating the glorious recovery of their country's 'Malvinas' islands some time in the second half of 1982. The adventure had been hat- ched the previous December. Buenos Aires's own Don Giovanni, General Galtieri, had seen it as setting the seal on his career, the final rejoinder to the junta's ever-present Commendatore, the late Juan Peron. Admiral Anaya's operational plann- ing had begun in January and by February the need for diplomatic intelligence had led to it being leaked to the press.

Had this plan been carried out 'some time in the second half of 1982' — the inva- sion would probably have been conclusive. HMS Endurance would have departed. UN opinion would have been prepared and at least neutralised. Argentina's navy would be bristling with new frigates, jets and air- launched Exocets. Any British response would have been crippled by the South Atlantic winter; a task force would almost certainly have failed. As it was, the South Georgia incident disastrously pre-empted the plan. Initial British humiliation was swiftly followed by war and total British victory.

Victory knows no post-mortem. It is the vanquished who traditionally search their consciences as to why their lost ones died 'in vain'. Yet in the case of the Falklands, the trauma of that first humiliation produc- ed from Mrs Margaret Thatcher the rash promise of post-mortem even before she had embarked on her crushing act of expia- tion. When the remit for Lord Franks and his committee was finally prepared after the war was over, he was told scrupulously not to trespass beyond the shame of 2 April, lest he risk damage to the glory of the subsequent victory.

We now realise what an impossible remit this was. How can a coroner seek the cause of a political death when he knows it was followed by a sensational resurrection? Was the corpse not up and dancing in the street? Yet to read the Franks report a year after the event is to be baffled and amazed. His admonitions are so mild and his exonera- tions so generous that they are not so much a verdict as a mumbled apology from the dock. Here was not a nation humiliated, its borders unguarded and its soldiers dead. It was rather more like a genteel City bank, recently cheated of money by a dastard foreigner with a strategem which only a cad would have detected. We know that British ministers received the report with surprised delight; even Mrs Thatcher expected something worse. Franks is still referred to in Whitehall in hushed tones, lest the skeletons of the three disgraced ministers, Lord Carrington, Humphrey Atkins and Richard Luce, start rattling too loud in the Foreign Office cupboard. Those famous words — 'We would not be justified in at- taching any criticism or blame to the pre- sent government' — were spun of political gold so fine it might snap at the slightest tug.

Franks was not the first committee to whitewash the government which appointed it, nor will it be the last — though perhaps we might accept that privy councillors are not the most rigorous investigators of the nation's privy counsels. What was extraor- dinary was that the committee did not bother to examine the central issue on which it was adjudicating: what caused the Falklands dispute suddenly to erupt into war? The answer was twofold: Britain's total ignorance of the Argentinians' original invasion plan and the inadequacy of successive military assessments of the Falklands defences. Neither is discussed critically by Franks.

The Galtieri/Anaya plan is nowhere

mentioned in the report and I understand the committee made no attempt to in" vestigate it. The April invasion therefore emerges on stage as an act of God, or to use the report's ambiguous cliche, of provoked aggression'. Time and again 1-01`. Franks and his colleagues asked witnes5e5 whether the April invasion could have been foreseen. No, they replied in unison. SO we know the junta did not decide on tile April date until at most six 05 beforehand, this limited line of questioning yielded only the banal conclusion that April invasion could neither have bee'' predicted nor prevented. On this fliral foundation, the whole structure ministerial exoneration is built.

Military aggression may be unjustified but it is rarely unprovoked. Indeed' ensuring provocation is the essence of an ag' gressor's tactics. Ironically, Argentina Iasi March was not (yet) looking for provoe,a. tion,. though this did not stop Britain 00- tingly supplying it. British intelligence tainly anticipated military action Buenos Aires later in 1982 if certain courseic of action (or inaction) were pursued. 5 wrongly predicted what those course. would be, assuming 'graduated escalation rather than precipitate aggression. It al° appeared unaware of the revamped Argil' tinian invasion plan, ready for implement!. tion some time between June and Octobei: Indeed, since the military advice had alwa,.Y; been that it was not feasible to defend tlid islands against large-scale or deterrnin.e, Argentinian attack, everyone (includl Franks) seems to have treated any stic threat as virtually hors de combat. The original invasion plan was leaked III! February. It was on the lips of everY wetis informed journalist and every garruloi military attache, of which Argentina lthae plenty. Iglesias Rouco, mouthpiece of the military, even said it would be impleoen,,,t..e in three or four months' time. A '''ce act of will on the part of British intelligen4 must have been required to discount evidence. But why, well after the war vsfil, over and the later invasion plan was c° (0 mon knowledge, did Franks not botherew investigate the matter? As a result, the cos tral questions are not addressed: whY ter. this plan not predicted and eold,r1 measures initiated — or at least specitten.tisft declared impossible? And was any Br! .bie action, however inadvertent, responsi for precipitating it in April? Without trcre answers to these questions, how can we P perly blame or exonerate anyone? The failure of British intelligence eorr.ec,gt. ly to analyse Admiral Anaya's and the Pear ta's intentions in the early weeks of last w Y_ere meant that Foreign Office ministers rtain left with no ammunition against the net resistance to ship movements in the Caurlio defence committee. In March the P for Minister certainly had little sympathY but the foreign and defence departmeotse,or had she been challenged with the Pr is tionary steps taken by James Callagtia,,ed 1977 she would surely have been galvaiTi into more decisive action than her scraw tile red book margin on 3 March: `We must 1,1,1.aite contingency plans.' Franks accepted "le Joint Intelligence Committee view that the 'threat' was nowhere near as great as in ,1977. Yet that view, however well-meant ;an important quality to Franks), was total- 'Y and catastrophically wfong. If any es- Di°11age agency wants evidence of the im- Portance of first-class intelligence it is sup- plied by the 900 dead of the South Atlantic War, When ministers were confronted by the South Georgia landings on 19 March, they therefore had no strategy to guide them and no clue as to what was motivating the junta 8. tient:is Aires. Since the Argentinian in- vasion on 2 April almost certainly resulted from the British response to South Georgia, this helplessness was crucial. It was well il- :ustrated by two bad decisions promptly ,..taken. The first was to dispatch Endurance 'rom Port Stanley to South Georgia to con- front the Argentinian landing. This was an Overtly provocative gesture, made with no " ;'lltarY reinforcement should it be con- tested, which it was. Ministers excused this ti,eeision (though not apparently to Franks) f'n the curious grounds that Parliament riclirced them into it. The second non- Was not to order the immediate ;e1310Yrrient of nuclear submarines. Britain, :n Other words, was risking a provocation to invade without attempting any covert Precautionary steps to prevent it. „„W,hen submarines were eventually sent "" 49 March — even Franks admits there is a 'case' for regarding this as too late — the iletvs leaked in London and provided ItaYa with his final argument to the junta it7„1- a Precipitate invasion. (Franks made no s,yestigation of this staggering breach of VeiY in London.) Ministers thus found h nselves like rabbits caught in oncoming ,eatilights, with no idea which way they run. They were in this predicament adteause of their own past actions and the viCe they were receiving from officials. biet 'no one was to blame'. By using the am- _ guOus term 'unprovoked', where he really 12eant slides clprovoked but unjustified, Franks everly out of his political dilemma. The second and more controversial omis- -h, sion from Franks arises out of the first. A'"re committee's failure to inquire into nol etitina,s own Falklands strategy led it to r'e_uerestirnate the role which limited deter- islace might have played in saving the th; deter- island from disaster. Franks is not alone in 'deed he merely parrots the view of sitiornilitarY assessments of the Falklands

the early 1970s: the islands were 'in-

against full-scale Argentinian at- Year, In the Commons on 25 January this 7;; Mrs Thatcher went further. Even En- cie„hce and nuclear submarines were not a ed,fcrrient. Nothing could stop a `determin- bantli I-scale assault' — short of a full naval hay! neet. To critics who said she should %you', sent submarines sooner, she replied it res,, Would it made no difference; the junta's bor3nse would have been 'to launch an air- 4i,,'_ure invasion supported by ground attack c aft'. The answer not only begged the question of why she regretted withdrawing Endurance and why she sent submarines herself on 29 March (though she later said they were merely to 'await' the carrier force, which cannot have been the case). It also reflected the defeatism towards Falklands defences of all military assessments. In that theatre, the MoD had been lulled by its own sense of insecurity.

An operational assessment is not a political one. It adds up the opposing force and estimates what is required to meet it. In the South Atlantic, the view was that the only credible alternatives were 'Fortress Falklands' or next-to-nothing. This assumption that an Argentinian invasion would take the form of a massive air-sea strike, deliberately to outgun any limited deterrent force, not only conflicted starkly with modern tripwire deterrent theory — it also splendidly suited everyone's book. It helped the Foreign Office argue that the islands were indefensible and should therefore be negotiated away. It supported the Navy's view that a large conventional navy still had an `out of area' role to play, while it also saved it from boring tours of duty in this unattractive part of the world. When such an assessment is looked at in political terms its inadequacy is apparent. The essence of all Argentina's invasion plans was that they should be bloodless; domestic and world acceptance required it. It is acknowledged that these plans foundered on the presence of British sub- marine units in the South Atlantic, of which the Argentinian navy was terrified. In her January 1983 speech, Mrs Thatcher herself admitted that the 1977 invasion was aborted because of 'Third World opinion': a junta thus deterred is made of mice not men. The very fact that the original 1982 invasion was timed to take place after the withdrawal of Endurance indicates that this modest vessel did have some deterrent effect. Even the pre-emptive invasion on 2 April was only contemplated after Endurance had been removed from Port Stanley to South Georgia by an obliging Downing Street. There is not a shred of evidence that Buenos Aires expected to fight any air, sea or land battle for the Falklands, and there is considerable evidence that had one been

'No sign of Blunt; knowing him, he's pro- bably wangled his way into heaven.'

necessary Anaya would not have gained junta support to proceed. The loss of even one ship would have been considered too high a price, internally and externally. After losing the Belgrano later in the conflict, the navy surrendered altogether, though by then the junta was too committed to withdraw its occupation. How many lives might have been saved had such a ship — or any ship — been sunk in the Falklands ap- proaches on the night of 1 April? The entire Argentinian plan was predicated on a sud- den, uncontested, naval sally followed by a diplomatic denouement with Britain. Even then, the venture was anathema to the air force. It is inconceivable that this service would have launched its own assault without naval support. The army, for its part, was right out of things. It was only called in to support the marines with its un- trained conscript troops after the British task force had sailed. Who on earth briefed Mrs Thatcher on 25 January this year?

Franks's apologists argue that we do not know for sure that a limited naval deploy- ment — say after Galtieri seized power or after the February talks turned sour — would have deterred invasion. Perhaps, but what happened to the maxim, 'better safe than sorry'? Certainly deployment would have been costly, provocative and of in- definite duration. So too is the British Ar- my of the Rhine. The public expects British territory to be defended to the extent that competent intelligence deems necessary.

There was one other deterrent which might have been tried: a ringing public statement by Mrs Thatcher that if an inva- sion occurred she would send down a full task force to recapture the islands and with a vengeance. Since such a message would have cost nothing — and would have been true — it was surely a deterrent worth trying as the South Georgia incident moved towards crisis. Whether it would have been believed or not in Buenos Aires, the Argen- tinian dove faction bitterly maintain it would have caused the junta some second thoughts. Instead, they only received the wet assertion, after Anaya had launched the actual invasion, that Britain would not `ac- quiesce' in it and would regard it as a casus belli. This obscure archaism hardly con- veyed the blood and thunder of the task force then already planned.

Mrs Thatcher told Franks she could not make any more emphatic ultimatum because neither her chiefs of staff nor the Cabinet had advised her so. Franks lets this pass without comment and merely con- cludes his satisfaction that `warnings by the British government of the consequences of invading the Falkland Islands were con- veyed to the Argentine government'. This is extraordinary. Why were the chiefs of staff and Cabinet unable to present such advice at this moment of crisis? The answer is that over the crucial period no one thought to ask them.

With the exception of the three departed ministers, no one to my knowledge has taken the blame for the mistakes which led to the Falklands debacle. The lesson of the Falklands invasion to anyone in public life

is clear: if you see disaster approaching, keep your head well below the parapet, wait for a leader of Mrs Thatcher's undoubted quality to salvage victory from defeat and then rely on some future Franks to trip through Whitehall, spilling indulgences from his bag like a mediaeval pardoner. The war produced from Britain's armed forces a remarkable victory, but the war

should never have happened and could well have been prevented. It is not much of a democracy which cannot come clean and say so.

Simon Jenkins is political editor of the Economist and co-author with Max Hastings of The Battle for the Falklands (Michael Joseph).