It’s merely not based on Aristotelian logic. I mean, when something starts like this:
If some supreme being could give British leftists of my generation the power to go back and stop one historical event, I have no doubt that we would rewind the tape and wipe out the Falklands war. Before General Galtieri’s fascistic junta invaded the islands Margaret Thatcher had no “-ism” after her name. She seemed a doomed prime minister surrounded by enemies, whose party was third in the polls behind the SDP, a political force I suspect many young readers have never heard of. After Britain’s victory, nothing could stop her and by the time she had finished, British socialism was dead, and the prospects for British social democracy did not seem much healthier.
…you would assume that we’re about to hear some solemn pontificating on how the UK needs to mediate its dispute with Argentina. Not so much: the title is “Obama should back our claim to the Falklands,” and the author is calling the President a neoconservative for not siding with the Brits.
No, really.
As the tottering government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner tries to whip up anti-British feeling by condemning oil prospecting in the Falklands, the supposedly liberal Obama administration remains as equivocal now as Jeane Kirkpatrick and the neoconservative admirers of “authoritarianism” were in 1982.
[snip]
here will not be a second Falklands war this year because the Argentinians know we would defeat them. But if not over the Falklands then on some other crisis, Obama will have to make up his mind whether he wants to be a liberal president or to follow the worst rather than the best traditions of neoconservatism and hold that basic principles can always be sacrificed for the sake of a usually deluded view of the American national interest.
This after admitting that “[e]ven by the sluttish standards of political debate, [neocon] has become the insult of fools.” Which is, by the way, very true; and generally speaking Kirkpatrick had a point when she noted that authoritarian governments were more likely to eventually transition into democratic governments than communist ones*. That being said; this is one very odd article. I mean, I agree with the central point – the USA needs to back the UK over Argentina – but the way that it got to that conclusion… well. It’s all kind of surreal.
Moe Lane
*I would have said ‘communist totalitarian’ ones, except that this would imply that there were non-totalitarian communist governments out there. And that notion is blatantly absurd.