Word: wheelus
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Each year since Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seized power in 1969, Libya has celebrated the day that he expelled U.S. military personnel from Wheelus Air Base, outside Tripoli. It was widely assumed that Gaddafi would use last week's 16th anniversary of the occasion to make his first live public appearance since U.S. warplanes attacked Tripoli and Benghazi last April. Western reporters were invited to Tripoli and advised to expect a major speech. Gaddafi never turned up. An apathetic crowd of 2,000 Libyans who gathered in Tripoli instead heard a harangue, apparently videotaped earlier, that raised doubts about how much...
...power in 1969. Then a captain in the Libyan army, he staged a bloodless coup against the country's effete, Westward-leaning monarch, King Idris. Shortly after the coup, Gaddafi proclaimed the principles of his governmental policy, which included the elimination of all foreign bases (including the American-run Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli), neutrality in foreign policy and national unity in a country that until then had been sharply divided along provincial and tribal lines. A year later, Gaddafi announced that not only had these objectives been met but that the minimum wage had been doubled, huge development projects...
...revolutionary government, is a compulsive orator who occasionally stumbles over his own rhetoric. He did so again last week before a clutch of visiting Arab notables and a crowd of 10,000 attending a celebration marking the second anniversary of Libya's takeover of the former U.S. Wheelus Air Force Base outside Tripoli. Gaddafi scored the U.S. for racism and imperialism but thundered most harshly at Britain "because Britain handed Palestine over to the Jews and handed the Gulf islands to Iran"-a reference to three small islands in the Persian Gulf claimed by both Iran and Arab nations...
...trying to strike a balance in the U.S. position." Cairo's Al Ahram detected "new elements" in the U.S. approach. That is true largely because the U.S. has lately discerned new elements in the Arab approach. Not long ago, Libya ousted the U.S. Air Force from its huge Wheelus Base; Jordan expelled an American envoy; bombs ripped U.S. cultural centers in Beirut and Amman. Today...
...first acts since he overthrew King Idris and became head of state in September 1969 was to take down the foreign-language street signs in his dreary seaside capital of Tripoli. Since then he has banished nightclubs, alcohol and the teaching of English, ousted 6,000 American servicemen from Wheelus airbase and forced the British to retire from their airbase at Tobruk...