Word: tobruk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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About halfway through the 90-minute interview in Tobruk, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was interrupted by a military aide who handed him a note. The revolutionary who heads Libya's government paused in his bitter denunciation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty just long enough to read the message. Then he smiled wanly, shook his head and waved the aide away with the back of his hand. The note informed Gaddafi that live TV coverage of the White House signing ceremony was beginning in the next room. Gaddafi clearly preferred to talk about the treaty rather than join his staff...
...incredibly complex recreations of such historical battles as Waterloo, Agincourt, Gettysburg, and sells them at the rate of about $2 million worth a year. Avalon Hill Game Co., the other big manufacturer, markets such simulations as Starship Troopers, a science-fiction game, and the complex tank-warfare re-creation Tobruk. Dunnigan's firm also imagines wars that have not yet happened: the one between the Soviets and the Chinese, the Canadian civil war, the invasion of America. The Pentagon buys Dunnigan's games, he says (and presumably plays with his maps and dice and cardboard counters...
Privately, Egyptian spokesmen conceded that there was a serious political purpose behind the armored assaults along the border and the series of preemptive bombing strikes at airbases and radar installations. The Egyptians hit Libyan airfields at Al Adem, near Tobruk, Al Kufra and Umm Alayan, as well as a training camp for African "volunteers" near Al Jaghbub, which was attacked by helicopter-borne commandos. According to Egyptian intelligence, reports TIME Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn, Gaddafi-in cooperation with Ethiopia and with Soviet support -planned to launch attacks on moderate governments all across northeast Africa...
...rumbled once more. In one battle, claimed Cairo, Egyptian troops knocked out 40 Libyan tanks and disabled 30 other vehicles at the cost of one truck and one wounded soldier. Next day bomb-laden Egyptian jets swept across Libya, inflicting heavy damage on an airbase at El Adem, near Tobruk...
According to Cairo, that was the extent of the lesson Egypt wanted to teach Gaddafi. But at week's end, the Libyan-based Arab Revolutionary News Agency insisted that Egyptian MiGs were striking targets that stretched from the Mediterranean to some 250 miles south of Tobruk. The attacks, charged a Libyan spokesman, were "in preparation for a land offensive on Libya." Boasting that Gaddafi's forces had downed eight Egyptian warplanes, the spokesman then warned: "If this unjustifiable aggression is not stopped, the Libyan forces will retaliate strongly in the depth of Egypt." Officials in Cairo at first...