Word: terrorist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with only limited success when it tried using more conventional forces to hit back at terrorists. When Jimmy Carter dispatched Marine helicopters to rescue the embassy hostages in 1980, the result was wreckage in the desert. Bombing runs over Lebanon in 1983 resulted in the capture of a naval aviator, Lieut. Robert Goodman, who was later retrieved by Jesse Jackson. Only the snatching of the Achille Lauro hijackers and perhaps the 1986 bombing of Libya could be considered effective in reducing terrorist activity...
Though the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December caused the number of U.S. terrorist victims last year to shoot up sharply, hijackings and kidnapings have actually decreased in recent years. A surge of terrorist incidents was expected after the downing of the Iranian Airbus by the U.S.S. Vincennes last July, but it did not take place. French hostages in Lebanon were released last year with the intervention of Iran...
...President. He jumped off his helicopter Marine One onto the South Lawn of the White House. Walking in the fetid summer air toward the Oval Office, he kicked an acorn lying on the drive, a small sign of George Bush's frustration at finding himself caught in the terrorist web that humiliated his predecessors. That was about his only display of raw anger...
Bush's approach is certainly not rooted in scholarship but in a remarkable range of close-in experience with dozens of terrorist acts over the past two decades. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, between lengthy jousting with the alerted journalists, recalled being with Vice President Bush in Paris in 1985, when the TWA Flight 847 hostages were being driven from Lebanon to Syria to be released. "Now, Marlin," said Bush in a cool and level voice, "tell me once again why I should appear on Face the Nation just at this moment. And remember, if that caravan turns and goes back...
Whether deliberate or not, Bush seems to have developed a new pattern of reaction for these events. His calls to a dozen heads of state and his orders to ambassadors and military commanders set in motion literally hundreds of probes and pressures to pinch off the terrorist acts, perhaps the most comprehensive network ever stitched together so quickly and so quietly. That is much harder work than going to war, and the returns are not yet in. The use of force may still be the only effective answer. Bush's exercise of power is another experiment in the new world...