Page 147 - NS-2 Textbook

140 MARITIME HISTORY

U.S. Marines patrolling a street in Panama during Operation Just Cause in 1989.

the issue of a homeland for the Palestinian Arabs, which cide bomber driving a truck full of explosives attacked
caused alnlost continuous strife between Israel and the headquarters building at Beirut Airport housing
neighboring Arab states. Many of the more extreme Arab some of the peacekeeping force. This resulted in the
groups involved in both struggles, unable to challenge deaths of 241 marines and naval personnel in the build-
Israel and the Western nations with military interests in ing at the tinle.
that area, turned to international terrorism to advance Other terrorist actions during the 1980s included the
their causes. Since many of the terrorist acts involved taking of civilian and military hostages of u.s. and sev-
U.s. allies or U.S. citizens or both, our armed services, es- eral other Western nationalities, car bombings, assaults
pecially the Navy and Marine Corps, were asked to re- against civil facilities such as airports and train stations,
spond to several of the crises-but not always with ben- and airliner bombings and hijackings. In the early part of
eficial results. One of the most tragic events occurred the decade, a number of these actions were shown to
after a Marine force was asked to join the UN peace- have been directly sponsored by Libyan leader Colonel
keeping effort in Lebanon in 1983. On 23 October a sui- Muammar Qaddafi, who had established several terror-
ist h'aining bases within Libya. In the mid-1980s Qaddafi
began to make tlu'eats concerning freedom of navigation
in the Gulf of Sidra in the Mediterranean off Libya's
northern shore. There were several incidents involving
u.s. naval air and surface forces, during which Libyan
fighters were shot down and Libyan patrol boats were
sunk.
Finally, on 15 April 1986, in retaliation for the contin-
uing threats and several Libyan-sponsored terrorist acts
against u.s. citizens in Europe, and with the agreement
of most of our European allies, a combined attack was
carried out against Libyan terrorist support bases. Air
Force F-l11s based in England struck army barracks and
an airport near Tripoli and the port of Sidi Bila!. Carrier-
There was not much left of the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut
following the terrorist bombing in 1983. based A-7s and F / A-6s attacked other barracks at Ben-