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The mixture of history, passion, miscalculation, national pride and personal egotism that produced a "little" war that everyone knew was senseless and avoidable also contains the ingredients for a much larger conflict. Last and first, the Falklands war was caused by the original miscalculation on the part of the Argentinian military junta that a Western democracy was too soft, too decadent to defend itself. This delusion on the part of undemocratic governments has been, and remains, the greatest danger to peace in this century. The cacophonous self-criticism of the democracies and the unwavering insistence of their people that peace must be the paramount goal of their elected governments are signs of great strength, but autocrats persist in mistaking them for signs of weakness. The British demonstrated that a free people have not only kept a sinewy grip on the values they seem to take for granted but are willing to fight for them, and to fight supremely well against considerable odds. The cost was great, but not as great as the cost of a miscalculation by Moscow should it forget these truths. The Falklands crisis was the most useful and timely reminder of the true character of the West in many years. Indeed, Britain's action in the Falklands may have marked a historic turning point in what has been the long and dangerous night of Western passivity.
As for my own role in the crisis, however, I did not come home with peace. Nor was there peace for me at home. The episode let loose the leakers again. Even after all the months I had spent in the trenches with the President's aides, I was startled to hear reports emerging from the White House that I had undertaken the Falklands mission as a means of upstaging Ronald Reagan in his visits to Jamaica and Barbados. The White House term for my peace mission, I was told, was "grandstanding." This was a charge that might better have been leveled at Leopoldo Galtieri and his comrades in Argentina, but I saw no point in bringing this to the attention of the President's ruffled aides.
The intensity of the gossip reported in the press increased steadily. Because of the collapse of my effort to mediate in the Falklands, I was now more vulnerable than ever. A lifelong friend who is in a position to know called to say that there had been a meeting in the White House at which my future had been discussed. "Haig is going to go, and go quickly," James Baker was quoted by my friend as saying, "and we are going to make it happen."
Lurching Toward War in Lebanon
Israel has never had a greater friend in the White House than Ronald Reagan. Yet in the early months of Reagan's presidency, Israel administered a series of violent shocks to the Administration and to public opinion—its expanded policy of building settlements in the West Bank, its attack on June 7,1981, on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, its vigorous opposition to the sale of American AWACS to Saudi Arabia. As a result, the assumption that the U.S. would always unreservedly support Israel in a contest of interests with its Arab neighbors ceased to apply.
Israel came under unprecedented and sometimes exasperated public criticism from officials of the Administration. The power of Israel and its friends to influence American policy in the