LONDON - Twenty-eight years after the outbreak of the Falklands conflict the man who secured US backing for Britain’s recapture of the islands has called the Obama Administration’s foreign policy team “a bunch of amateurs” for failing to support Britain over Argentina once again.

By asserting its neutrality in the latest dispute over oil in the Falklands basin the US has handed Argentina a diplomatic victory, according to Lawrence Eagleburger, who helped to persuade President Reagan to throw American intelligence and logistical support into the war on Britain’s side. He said that Britain’s role alongside the US in Afghanistan since 2001 had only made the situation worse.

“Under the circumstances, with Afghanistan, I can’t see why we’d be doing anything other than being very pro-British because you are putting troops there,” Mr Eagleburger told The Times in an interview in which he also recalled that Margaret Thatcher won over the Reagan Cabinet partly because “people were afraid to argue with her”.

To mark today’s anniversary of the Falklands invasion President Kirchner of Argentina will walk to the edge of the Beagle Channel, on the southern tip of Patagonia, and sprinkle petals on the water in memory of the 649 Argentine soldiers and sailors who died in 74 days of fighting.

The war claimed 255 British lives but it is in Argentina that the human cost of the war has remained a potent political weapon.

Mrs Kirchner is expected to reassert Argentina’s claim to sovereignty over the islands today at a ceremony in the world’s southernmost city of Ushuaia, and to attack recent British efforts to develop oilfields in Falklands waters. In Buenos Aires a service will be held in the central Plaza de Mayo to highlight successive governments’ neglect of war veterans since their defeat nearly three decades ago.

America played a vital role in that defeat, not least by opening a US base on Ascension Island to British Forces, but its support was by no means a foregone conclusion.

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