Word: beirutization
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Mondale is doing his best to prove otherwise. After first reacting to the latest Beirut car bombing with a statement of sympathy for the victims' families and support for the President, Mondale harshly criticized the Administration for failing to anticipate the attack. The U.S. had received clear-cut threats that terrorists planned to strike at a U.S. installation in Beirut, Mondale said, and it knew from prior experience that a car bomb was the most likely weapon. In addition, he said, some of the security measures recommended by the Long Commission, established in the wake of the Marine barracks...
...third time in 17 months, a major U.S. target in Beirut is bombed...
...last Thursday, a van with diplomatic license plates pulled up at a checkpoint outside the embassy annex, a building in East Beirut that in the past few months had become the headquarters of Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew and his staff. The car was ordered to halt by the Lebanese security guards on duty at the checkpoint. Suddenly the driver pulled a gun and shot at one of the guards. Then, as another guard shouted and ran after the van, the driver raced his engine, zigzagged through the "dragon's teeth," a staggered row of concrete blocks designed to reduce...
...ugly standards of Lebanon's recent history, the toll was not all that high. Just 17 months earlier, 63 people had been killed in the car bombing of the old U.S. embassy in West Beirut. Six months later, similar suicide bombings within moments of each other took the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. Sixty-one others died two weeks after that when a bomb devastated an Israeli military headquarters in the southern port city of Tyre. In the meantime, of course, untold hundreds have died in the continuing chaos throughout Lebanon...
...latest atrocity was deeply troubling to U.S. officials. It demonstrated that despite an array of new security precautions instituted during the past year, embassies and other facilities are still vulnerable to attack by terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives. The bombing showed that Christian East Beirut, which has until now been far less volatile than Muslim West Beirut, is nowhere near as secure as had been believed. It also indicated that despite a sharp decline in the American military and diplomatic presence in Lebanon over the past seven months, the U.S. remains a favorite target of fanatical Muslim terrorism...