Word: raids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Privately, the governments of Britain, France and Italy had reservations about the Navy air raid. They were particularly upset that they had received virtually no advance notice that the attack would take place. The British acknowledged publicly that the U.S. had an "inherent right of self-defense," but they were angry about what one official described as Ronald Reagan's "illadvised, counterproductive and downright dangerous" escalation of the conflict. The British disagree with the U.S. perception of Syria as a Soviet satellite and are concerned that Washington will seek to use Israel as "America's Cuba." Similarly, the French government...
When two U.S. Navy attack planes were downed during last week's raid on Syrian missile positions, Pentagon officials quickly ran into some heavy flak at home about what had gone wrong. In Washington and elsewhere critics demanded to know why the U.S. had suffered such humiliating losses in a single mission, especially when the Israelis have for years conducted similar sorties in the region virtually unscathed...
Other aspects of the raid were harder to explain. The main reason the two planes had been destroyed, said the Navy, was that they encountered unusually intense antiaircraft fire. Yet the strike had been ordered to retaliate...
...nighttime raid was ruled out on grounds that the pilots could pinpoint...
...Pentagon has tried to justify the losses from the air strike with the conclusion that the raid was "very successful and achieved our objective" of ending attacks on U.S. reconnaissance flights, which have already resumed. That view is mistaken, according to some military experts familiar with the Middle East. "I'll be surprised if the attack managed to do much lasting damage to Syrian antiaircraft capabilities," said one analyst, who predicted that the Syrians would soon redeploy their batteries. That raises not only the possibility of further strikes from U.S. forces but also the question of how such strikes...