Word: tankerful
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...cold chills through Reagan Administration officials, who are still pondering how to deal with this latest and most dangerous phase of the 44-month-old war between Iran and Iraq. Saddam Hussein's fighting words also marked a resumption, after a respite of five days, of the devastating tanker war in the Persian Gulf. Twenty-four hours after he spoke, Iraq announced that it had hit two "naval targets" to the southeast of Kharg Island. Iran responded almost immediately by striking and heavily damaging a Liberian-registered tanker, the Chemical Venture, off Saudi Arabia. Next day Iraq claimed...
...latest round in the tanker war began early last week when a Kuwaiti-owned tanker of medium size, the Umm Casbah, was hit by rockets after leaving the Kuwaiti port of Mina al-Ahmadi. The Britain-bound ship was only slightly damaged, and after an emergency stop at Bahrain it sailed on toward the Strait of Hormuz with its cargo of fuel oil. The same evening, Iraq declared that it had not fired on gulf shipping for four days. If true, it could only mean that Iran had joined the tanker war at last...
...next day, the Iraqis retaliated by attacking two tankers in the vicinity of Kharg Island. Both the Greek-owned Esperanza No. 2 and the Iranian-owned Tabriz were set ablaze. The ships were in the area where the Al Ahood, hit a week earlier, was still floundering and in danger of breaking up. Later that day, a Kuwaiti tanker, the Bahrah, was struck by a rocket after being circled by two unidentified planes. One aircraft returned to fire a second rocket, but the ship was able to continue to a Kuwaiti port. The Kuwaiti Cabinet subsequently issued a statement blaming...
...gulf states were slow to react to the tanker attacks. The foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates) met in Riyadh. But after almost five hours of talks, the ministers merely condemned the Iranian attacks and said they would appeal to the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League. Extreme caution dominates the thinking of even the most powerful of the gulf nations, Saudi Arabia. Before the Iranian attackers hit the Saudi tanker off Ras Tanura last week, a U.S.-operated AWACS radar plane detected...
...Iraq is desperate to end the war it started; Iran is determined to destroy Saddam Hussein at any cost; and Saudi Arabia is terrified of a possible Iranian victory. That adds up to a bad formula for peace. Thus, while insurance rates climb and world oil prices quiver, the tanker war is likely to go on. Summarizing his country's new policy, the leader of Iran's parliament, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, told his countrymen last week that they should be prepared for a "long-drawn-out war with the U.S." Said he: "Either the gulf will...