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The Road to Retaliation
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11277 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1986 |
2,670 Words |
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Neil C. Livingstone
Neil C. Livingstone is an author, lecturer, and frequent
media commentator. He runs a crisis-management firm in
Washington, D.C., and has authored eight books on terrorism,
including Inside the PLO (Morrow). |
The April 14, 1986, U.S. air strikes against Libya marked a significant watershed in U.S. efforts to control and suppress terrorism. Gone was the equivocation and vacillation that had for so long characterized U.S. policy dealing with terrorism. Despite the fact that President Reagan had come to power on the heels of Jimmy Carter's humiliation over the Iranian hostage crisis, the administration's terrorism policy to date had been one of caution and restraint. Although Reagan had decried terrorism and called for "swift and effective retribution," there had been a lot of tough talk but precious little action. As the months slipped by, the war on terrorism promised by Reagan seemed to be one of the greatest non-events of his administration.
The Reagan administration inherited only the vaguest outlines of a comprehensive anti-terrorism policy. Moreover, many of the military and intelligence tools needed to combat terrorism had been dismantled or disgraced in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Church and Rockefeller Committee hearings into the conduct of the American intelligence community.
Following Reagan's inauguration it did not take administration officials long to discover that the resources available to them for addressing the terrorism problem did not match the president's rhetoric. Equally serious was the fact that there was little consensus, either within the administration or in the Congress, as to what should be done.
Dirty kind of warfare
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, for one, maintained that efforts to rebuild U.S.
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