President Obama needs to stand by Britain in the new Falkland's dispute. Britain's claims of sovereignty are legitimate.
The people of those islands have a uniquely British-Americas identity. They utterly reject Argentine identity. We should respect that. As the Winnipeg Free Press pointed out:
Definitely not included among Argentina's concerns are the welfare and wishes of the Falkland Islanders themselves. A vast majority of them wish to remain a British dependency or become directly British. [Argentine Foreign Affairs Minister, Jorge] Taiana made it perfectly clear his government believes the residents have no say in deciding the status of their home.
Argentina is of the Americas, as is the United States. But the United States is also of Britain in ways cultural, political, and legal to an extent that many Americans themselves often do not realize. Also, the legacy of a two World Wars and Cold War partnership between Britain and the US should not be held cheap or thrown away lightly by President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton. (The Rhodes Scholarship that Secretary of State Clinton's husband got was about the relationship between which two countries again?) Th there is the problem of Argentina's government itself. Why should President Obama or his Secretary of State in this dispute support not Britain, but rather Argentine President Cristina Fernández who is disquietingly friendly with US-loathing Hugo Chavez and is doing what the President and countless members of his Administration rightly criticized President G. W. Bush for having done: drumming up nationalism at home with saber-rattling for the sake of re-election votes?
British soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan right now. In fact, British toll from the Afghan conflict just this week past the British military toll of the Falklands War. And US neutrality in this new Falklands dispute is not how America should say that it is are grateful.
(Photo: Liberation Day ceremony at the Liberation Monument in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands.)
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