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President Reagan acknowledged as much the following day on a visit to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation off the California coast. "This foray by the Libyans was nothing new over the past couple years," he said. "They have frequently harassed our aircraft out beyond the [disputed] line in the Mediterranean. There have even been incidents of threats of fire. We decided it was time to recognize what are the international waters and behave accordingly." Pointing out that U.S. naval vessels periodically visit the Black Sea, while Soviet vessels sail the Caribbean, he continued, "We didn't go there to shoot down a couple of Libyan planes. They came out and fired on ours when we were holding maneuvers in which everyone had been notified." If there was a message for the world in the incident, said the President, it might be "that we're determined to close that window of vulnerability that had existed for some time."
The U.S. Government's exasperation with Gaddafi had been building for a long time. Using Libya's vast oil wealth, he has fomented unrest throughout the Middle East and black Africa. In December 1979, at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, a Libyan mob attacked and burned the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. The Carter Administration quarreled sporadically with Gaddafi; it was also embarrassed by Gaddafi's bizarre efforts to cultivate influence in the U.S. through Jimmy Carter's wayward brother Billy.
The Reagan Administration has been trying to put Gaddafi in his place by various means for some time. On May 6, the U.S. asked Libya to close its Washington embassy—or "people's bureau," as the Libyans call their embassies—within five days, charging that its diplomats had intimidated Libyan dissidents in the U.S. and played a role in the attempted assassination of a student in Colorado. The same day the State Department issued the first of a series of statements urging U.S. citizens to leave Libya and avoid visiting it—a warning ignored by U.S. oilmen. Later the U.S. announced that it would help to bolster the defenses of Libya's neighbors, Tunisia and the Sudan, to "deter further Libyan adventurism." In late July, erroneous reports were published that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was planning to assassinate Gaddafi. This in turn caused a Libyan group called the Free Unionist Officers to threaten a campaign of "physical liquidation" against Americans, including President Reagan.
Particularly irritating to successive U.S. Administrations has been Gaddafi's interpretation of maritime law. The U.S. claims only three miles of ocean as its territorial waters, while Gaddafi insists on a twelve-mile limit. But since 1973, he has also claimed the waters of the Gulf of Sidra, which indents about a third of the Libyan coastline, as an internal sea. In some cases, a nation's sovereignty over a body of water is indeed recognized by international agreement, provided that the mouth of the bay or gulf concerned is no wider than 24 miles; the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra is more than ten times as broad as that. No other nation, not even the Soviet Union, recognizes the Libyan claim.