An idle mind is a curious thing. McClatchy Newspapers had a little piece yesterday about Argentina, and its military defeat by the UK in 1982. Reading it just made something go ‘click’ for me.

Most of you remember how it went down. There were some exciting naval and ground battles, and the Argentines lost. Two of the reasons they lost can be easily explained: the British troops were tougher, better trained. Soldiers of the 2nd and 3rd Para Regiments and 42 Commando of the Royal Marines walked 75 to 90 miles across open, wild, rocky country in 3 days, carrying 100 pound packs and when they arrived at their destinations swept into the attack almost immediately. The Argentine Army, mostly conscripts, were poorly led, inadequately clothed for the harsh weather of a winter in the Falklands, poorly armed, and lost every ground battle.

The British battle fleet lost ships to the Argentine Naval Air Force, but had some success with their integral Naval Air component, Harrier fighters carried on two aircraft carriers.

The irony of this is that if the military junta ruling Argentina had waited eight months, there would have been no naval air at the Falklands. The British Ministry of Defense was in the process of decommissioning both carriers. The expedition would have been impossible without those carriers, and the Falklands today would be the Malvinas.

The decision to invade and occupy the Falklands was made for several reasons. The official reason was a long diplomatic dispute over the actual “ownership” of the islands. But as the McClatchy story points out, there might have been a second reason:

“The war shouldn't have ever existed," said [Gabriel] Sagastume, now a prosecutor in this provincial capital. "Much less to take us there in the condition they took us, and afterwards not give us food and not give us munitions and not do things minimally well."

Twenty-five years after British and Argentine forces clashed over patches of rock that were home to more sheep than people, Argentines are still debating the legacy of the Falklands War, known here as the Malvinas War.

Was it, as Sagastume and many others argue, a misguided effort by a corrupt dictatorship to distract Argentines from a failing economy and the government's brutal persecution of dissidents? Or was it a heroic, if ultimately failed, effort to reassert rightful Argentine authority over territory spirited away by colonizers 149 years ago? [emph added]

At the time the Argentines occupied the Falklands there was some discussion about this in the US. It’s traditional in a dictatorship to find and fight an external enemy in order to distract the citizens who are suffering greatly under a corrupt government mismanaging an economy.

As we approach the 2008 elections, and as the actual economy (as opposed to the paper economy of the stock market) worsens because of escalating energy prices, more jobs shipped overseas for cheaper labor costs, stagnant wages and crippling costs for essentials, we can look forward to further war drums about Iran and Syria.

All dictatorships are the same.