"Falklands war 1982- a US diplomat's private view" Topic

I found this document while looking for something completely different.
One of the most interesting things I've read about the Falklands war for a while.
I can't vouch for it's authenticity but the named writer was a US diplomat and member of Al Haig's 'shuttle diplomacy' mission before the war.
It is quite long and really gets going around page 20, but some of its insights are quite striking:
- The views of the US diplomats of the Argentinian leadership after dealing with them for a while.
- Their view of Margaret Thatcher- just as tough as the TV image.
- Their view of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, US Ambassador to the UN.

See what you think.

PDF link

What the heck is the site it's from?

Not sure what that website is, but having done some googling, the doc is also hosted here:

link

The actual cables that Rentschler drafted are in the State Department Archive:

link

Stylistically, this reads a lot like the reporting I remember INR (the State Department's in-house intelligence section) putting out twenty Hearst's ago. It's what Americans who imagine themselves to be Harold Nicholson write like. Showy, simultaneously vulgar and pretentious ("gonadal") and focused on the unimportant atmospheric details, which are laid on so thickly that they obscure the important insights.

This kind of self-satisfied prose demonstrates a problem that anyone used to dealing with today's official class will recognize- they are deeply unserious people, confusing the trivial with the serious. The dismaying thing about this is that the rot was visible already nearly forty years ago.