RCH

It was this discrepancy between the small importance of the prize and the strenuous effort needed to win it that shaped the early American (and European) reactions to the Falklands War. Columnists compared it to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta or cast it as a final spasm of Victorian jingoism. Jorge Luis Borges, the distinguished Argentinean writer, famously put this thought best: The dispute was “two bald men fighting over a comb.”

Thirty years later, the war looks very different — and much more significant.