MIDDLE EAST: Revenge in the Desert

"I could not hold back my armed forces!" shouted President Anwar Sadat on Egyptian TV, furiously pounding a desk for emphasis. "Yesterday and today they gave him a lesson he will never forget." No Egyptian needed to be told who "he" was. After four years of increasingly bitter feuding with Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Sadat last week unleashed his army and air force against Gaddafi's outgunned 30,000-man army.

Tanks and mechanized infantry units of two divisions of the First Egyptian Army, normally assigned to defend the regime in Cairo, pummeled the three...

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