XDA

I look back fondly on the Argentine/England War over the Falkland Islands in the Southern Atlantic nearly 25 years ago. Interesting, not too bloody--it was the first round of the inevitable war over Antarctic sovereignty which will almost certainly rage before the end of this century, as some of it was so far to the south as to be in the somewhat overlapping, pie shaped zones of control over Antarctica various nations claim. The Argentinians, I think, miscalculated Margaret Thatcher's and Queen Elizabeth II's resolve and tried to take what they called the Malvinas. If these islands were Argentine, why did the locals toast the Queen each night as the pubs closed at 11 pm with the flat, warm pond scum like stuff the British still call beer? I always used to ask that during the war to repatriate the Falklands into the Commonwealth on which the sun set decades ago. No one ever had an answer.

Seizure of a British trawler, specialized to catch the Illex Squid, by Argentine Navy boats, when the catch has fallen from 150,000 tons in 2001 to just 1,700 tons last year, has got the two old adversaries talking tough and wondering, as I am, whether the Brits have the grit to sail 10,000 miles in their tiny aircraft carriers and aluminum frigates and destroyers, the Ford Pintos of Navy vessels, and chew up again the hapless Argentine army freezing in the sheep fields. I doubt it comes to a real war (the Brits have nuclear submarines and nuclear missiles, for God's sake) but maybe if there's fighting and not overfishing, the Illex Squid can rebound.