El Dorado Canyon: Reagan's Undeclared War with Qaddafi

Long before the overt war in Afghanistan and the covert war against al-Qaida, U.S. forces struck at one of the world’s hotbeds of terrorism. On 15 April 1986, in the dead of night, American strike aircraft roared into the heart of Muammar Qaddafi's Libya, attacking carefully selected targets and nearly killing the “brother leader” himself. Codenamed Operation El Dorado Canyon, the raid was in direct response to Qaddafi's support of a terrorist act against U.S. service personnel stationed in E…