Word: mediterraneans
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...wrote many contingency plans," a top CIA officer told TIME last week. Among them: a joint U.S.-Egyptian operation designed to topple Gaddafi, a plan to work with the French that included offensive actions from both the Mediterranean and Chad, and covert action involving other North African governments. McFarlane dispatched Poindexter, then his deputy, to confer with Egypt and other allies in the Middle East and Europe. "We even approached Israel," the intelligence official notes. But the response was discouraging; intelligence reports showed little chance of fomenting a coup within Libya, and none of the ideas jelled. "We learned...
Once again, U.S. naval power was massed in the Mediterranean and poised to cross the imaginary "line of death" proclaimed by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi as marking his nation's territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidra. Once again, a senior U.S. Navy official insisted that "it is not provocative to assert internationally accepted rights" at sea. And once again no one took seriously the pro forma U.S. assertions that the naval exercises were routine. "Tommyrot!" scoffed a Pentagon source. "Of course we're aching for a go at Gaddafi." Agreed a senior White House aide: "If he sticks...
Despite that firepower, Libya is far from unprotected. Its air force includes some 480 Soviet and aging French-built aircraft. More ominously, a Kresta-class Soviet cruiser is anchored in Libyan waters. Seven other Soviet warships are nearby in the Mediterranean. If Gaddafi should rise to the bait and try forcibly to counter any U.S. movement across his line in the gulf, a prime U.S. retaliatory target might be the SA-5 antiaircraft sites that recently became operational at an airfield south of the Libyan city of Surt. One complication in hitting the sites: an attack could result in casualties...
...diplomacy to intimidate troublesome local rulers. Only now the gunboats have grown considerably larger. A U.S. aircraft carrier displaces up to 90,000 tons and carries enough conventional firepower to level all the airfields in, say, Libya. Normally, the U.S. Sixth Fleet has at most two carriers in the Mediterranean, but soon there will be three. This week, the America leaves Norfolk, Va., to join the Saratoga and the Coral...
...course, we Americans knew that, felt it in our marrow as we marched raucously across a continent. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner explained it to us in 1893, when he wrote of the closing of our Western frontier. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States...