MIDDLE EAST: Revenge in the Desert

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"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 brigades that Gaddafi managed to throw into battle. Meanwhile nearly a dozen Egyptian commando and paratrooper battalions dropped behind Libyan lines, and three squadrons of MiG fighter jets bombed and strafed Libyan cities and military bases. The fierce armor and air battles raged for at least three days.

Erstwhile Allies. On Sunday, Cairo launched more bombing raids and claimed that six Libyan planes and several tanks had been destroyed; two Egyptian Sukhoi 20 planes were shot down. Although the exact situation on the battlefield remained uncertain, one thing was clear: the dispute between these angry neighbors and erstwhile allies was close to careening out of control.

The battles began along the sandy Libyan-Egyptian border, 390 miles west of Cairo. In his telecast, Sadat insisted that Gaddafi—"that very strange person"—had ordered his forces to make border raids near Sallum (see map). In one such incursion, the Egyptian President said, the Libyans had taken 14 prisoners. "He felt proud of himself," Sadat said, "but he was playing with fire." The Libyans answered that it was the Egyptians who had been raiding across the border. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the Egyptians apparently reinforced their border forces last week and waited to strike, in order to teach Gaddafi what Sadat called an "unforgettable" lesson.

Along the Sallum escarpment, a narrow, sandy ridge between sea and impassable salt flats where British and German armor fought several World War II battles, tanks and planes rumbled once more. In one battle, claimed Cairo, Egyptian troops knocked out 40 Libyan tanks and disabled 30 other vehicles at the cost of one truck and one wounded soldier. Next day bomb-laden Egyptian jets swept across Libya, inflicting heavy damage on an airbase at El Adem, near Tobruk.

According to Cairo, that was the extent of the lesson Egypt wanted to teach Gaddafi. But at week's end, the Libyan-based Arab Revolutionary News Agency insisted that Egyptian MiGs were striking targets that stretched from the Mediterranean to some 250 miles south of Tobruk. The attacks, charged a Libyan spokesman, were "in preparation for a land offensive on Libya." Boasting that Gaddafi's forces had downed eight Egyptian warplanes, the spokesman then warned: "If this unjustifiable aggression is not stopped, the Libyan forces will retaliate strongly in the depth of Egypt." Officials in Cairo at first accused Libya of inventing "imaginary raids", but then admitted they were taking place. Libya complained to the United Nations about Egyptian "aggression."