On the 20th anniversary of the Task Force's departure for the Falklands, Glen Reynolds argues that the determination to recapture the islands had more to do with politics than freedom.

THE Falklands War was about the protection of British interests concerning Antarctic oil and moreover, in the midst of riots and instability in Britain, the preservation of a further Thatcherite term of office. It had nothing to do with the rights of some 1,800 islanders.

By the early 1980s international opinion was gearing itself up for the dismantling of old empires, which included (for the vast majority of the British population) the previously unidentifiable islands of the Falklands and South Georgia.

Discussions over sovereignty were under way. The resultant conflict was the outcome of two major miscalculations, by the British (for which Lord Carrington nobly resigned over a Foreign Office failure to foresee the invasion) and General Galtieri, who had announced on Argentinian television that a nation such as Britain with two women in charge, the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, would not risk the lives of its servicemen and women. How wrong he was.

The war cost Britain 255 men, six ships (ten others were badly damaged), nine Harriers and £1.6bn. The Tory Government was re-elected the following year with a landslide and in a spirit of jingoistic nationalism, and the economy started to improve.

Even the Labour leader, Michael Foot, a Quaker educated CND member, was in favour of the military action.

I believe that the mishandling of the unofficial and undeclared war was illustrated by the war crime sinking of the Argentinian flagship General Belgrano, which, in the single most isolated and costly incident of the war, resulted in the loss of 323 Argentinian sailors. Who can forget the rare flustering of Thatcher on BBC's Nationwide by a woman who questioned the PM as to why the ship was sunk as it was turning away from the "exclusion zone"?

Two years ago, the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg threw out an application by relatives of the dead sailors on a technicality regarding the lateness of the petition.

In 1999, one of the long-standing opponents of the war, Tam Dalyell, visited the President of Peru as part of a delegation to reflect upon the failed peace talks of 1982. Dalyell reported that the President had confirmed his own account of the scuppered peace talks. "He confirmed exactly what I had said in 1984, the purpose in sinking the Belgrano 36 hours after she was first sighted by HMS Conqueror on a west-north-west course of 270 degrees (travelling away from the islands) was to scupper the Peruvian peace proposals. Mrs Thatcher did not want to be denied a military victory which was what the Falklands War was about."

What we can learn from the Falklands War is that power corrupts, that the first casualty of war is the truth, and many of our brave serviceman died over an island 8,000 miles away, in relation to a dispute which will one day be settled amicably in a passing footnote of history and a re-interpretation of the sovereignty issue.