Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [129]
After Cabinet I sent a message to President Reagan saying that in our view the Argentinians must now be regarded as having rejected the American proposals. In fact, later that day the Argentinians did formally reject the American text. President Reagan now replied to my message in these terms:
I am sure you agree that it is essential now to make clear to the world that every effort was made to achieve a fair and peaceful solution, and that the Argentine Government was offered a choice between such a solution and further hostilities. We will therefore make public a general account of the efforts we have made. While we will describe the US proposal in broad terms, we will not release it because of the difficulty that might cause you. I recognize that while you see fundamental difficulties in the proposal, you have not rejected it. We will leave no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government worked with us in good faith and was left with no choice but to proceed with military action based on the right of self-defence.
This was very satisfactory. We wanted a clear statement that the Argentinians were to blame for the failure of negotiations. But we did not want to muddy the waters by revealing every detail of proposals which were in truth fundamentally unacceptable to us, nor did we want to imply that we had accepted the Haig proposals.
There was, though, one drawback. This was that once the Haig mediation had formally ended the pressure would sharply increase for us to go back to the UN where we would be faced by any number of difficulties. Indeed Tony Parsons advised us that once we were back in the Security Council there would be no way of avoiding an unacceptable call on us to halt military preparations and accept the good offices of the Secretary-General. This would mean that we would have to use our veto, which we wanted to avoid. In fact, although this assessment was correct it was not until the following month that all this came to a head. We were fortunate that it did not occur earlier.
Friday 30 April effectively marked the end of the beginning of our diplomatic and military campaign to regain the Falklands. The United States now came down clearly on our side. President Reagan told television correspondents that the Argentinians had resorted to armed aggression and that such aggression must not be allowed to succeed. Most important, the President also directed that the United States would respond positively to requests for military materiel. Unfortunately, they were not prepared to agree to place an embargo on imports from Argentina. However, the President’s announcements constituted a substantial moral boost to our position.
It was on this day that the TEZ came into force. And although diplomatic and military affairs remained inextricably intertwined, it is fair to say that from now on it was the military rather than the diplomatic which increasingly commanded our attention. At that morning’s War Cabinet it was the Argentine aircraft carrier, the 25 de Mayo, which concerned us. She could cover 500 miles a day and her aircraft a further 500. Her escorts carried Exocet missiles, supplied by France in the 1970s. We were well aware that the Exocet threat should be taken seriously. It increased the danger which the Argentine carrier group posed to our ships and their supply lines. We therefore authorized an attack on the carrier, wherever she was, provided it was south of latitude 35 degrees and east of longitude 48, and outside the 12-mile limit of Argentine territorial waters. Such an attack would be based upon the right of self-defence and be within Article 51 of the UN Charter; in accordance with the notification which had been given on 23 April no further warning was required.*
That evening I had to speak at a large rally in Stephen Hastings’s constituency at Milton Hall in Bedfordshire. Stephen and his predecessor Alan Lennox-Boyd spoke magnificently. I was given a wonderful reception. No one present had any doubt of the justice of our cause, nor that we would eventually