Word: skirmished
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...growing feeling that the Administration had exhausted every other alternative for taming Gaddafi. Said President Reagan, addressing a meeting of lawyers on Wednesday: "We tried quiet diplomacy. We tried public condemnation. We tried economic sanctions. And, yes, we tried a show of military might (the Sixth Fleet's skirmish in the Gulf of Sidra with Libyan patrol boats and missile batteries last month). But Gaddafi intensified his terrorist war, sending his agents around the world to murder and maim innocents...
Though Reagan did not order up an air strike then and there, it was clear to military planners that such an action was inevitable. The Pentagon brass was concerned, however, that it lacked the firepower to hit Gaddafi with sufficient force. Since the Sixth Fleet's skirmish only three weeks earlier with Libyan forces in the Gulf of Sidra, the fleet's strength had considerably diminished with the departure of the aircraft carrier Saratoga for its home base in Mayport, Fla. There was not sufficient time to order the flattop back to the central Mediterranean to join the carriers Coral...
...Orleans, Reagan pledged that the U.S. "would hold Mr. Gaddafi responsible for his actions." The Sidra skirmish showed that the U.S. would indeed strike back in a carefully calibrated way when given a clean and easy target. But such occasional shootouts, when accompanied by alarmist rhetoric but no sustained diplomatic initiatives, in the Middle East or elsewhere, are hardly a foundation for an effective policy, especially against terrorism. Nor does the battle of Sidra provide much of a guide for retaliation when the source of the threat is not as easy to identify as a speeding patrol boat...
...tell how seriously the targets of Reagan's bellicosity took it. On the night the Sixth Fleet sailed from the Gulf of Sidra, a fireworks display in Tripoli commemorating the 16th anniversary of the departure of the British military from Libya turned into a celebration of Gaddafi's latest skirmish with the U.S. In Nicaragua citizens enjoyed Holy Week by going to the beach, apparently unconcerned about the battle raging along the Honduran border. Nor did the President of Honduras, Jose Azcona Hoyo, seem overly concerned that his country was being invaded. He too went to the seashore...
...first the skirmish prompted a bit of anxiety among moneymen, especially when Seger declared that the board was no longer Volcker's "one-man show." Financiers feared that the Reagan appointees might lower the Federal Reserve's guard against inflation and bend too much to the Administration's eagerness to expand the economy. Said Norman Robertson, chief economist at Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank: "Any pretense of the Fed being nonpolitical is now gone...