Word: thatchers
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...world looked with dismay at the thunder of Israeli bombs on Beirut's civilians and at the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps. It was a year in which Argentina tested the decline of European power by seizing the Falkland Islands, only to see Britain, led by doughty Margaret Thatcher, meet the test by taking them back again...
...Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the year began inauspiciously. She had achieved the dubious distinction of being Britain's least popular national leader on record and her Conservative government had dropped to a humiliating 29% approval rating in opinion polls. The newly formed Social Democratic Party was running strong, and within her own Conservative Party there was considerable grumbling about her hard-line economic policies, which had brought high unemployment and an ever increasing number of bankruptcies...
...Thatcher wraps up her year a stunning winner, her iron-lady image polished to a high luster abroad, her stature as a political leader restored at home. It was a year that, thanks to a war 8,000 miles away, she will mark as a turning point in her fortunes. As a British businessman puts it: "In 1982 Prime Minister Thatcher restored our national pride." Her rating in the polls is up to 44%, and many Britons confidently predict that she would win an election handily if she chose to call...
...April 2 that Argentine troops invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote and irrelevant British colony 400 miles off the Argentine coast. The House of Commons reverberated with cries of "Resign!" Thatcher boldly dispatched a task force, which grew to more than 100 vessels, to the windswept South Atlantic. It was a 19th century show of force against "a tinpot dictator," as the British haughtily described Argentine President Leopoldo Fortunate Galtieri...
Catastrophe was always only an Exocet missile away, but Thatcher never wavered. "Failure?" she once asked derisively. "The possibilities do not exist." Seventy-four days later, the white flags of surrender were fluttering over the Falklands and victory belonged to Her Majesty's forces. Never mind that 255 British lives had been lost (750 to 1,000 for Argentina) or that six British navy ships and a merchant vessel had been destroyed. The triumph upheld both pride and principle, and with it came the so-called "Falklands factor" that lifted British spirits as well as Mrs. Thatcher's standing...