but ended up supporting the United Kingdom's counter-invasion. The US supplied the British Armed Forces with equipment as well as logistical support. In October 1983, the United States and an Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States coalition undertook Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the Commonwealth island nation of Grenada following a Marxist coup. Neighboring countries in the region asked the United States to intervene militarily, which it did successfully despite having made assurances to a deeply resentful British Government. On April 15, 1986, the US military under President Reagan launched Operation El Dorado Canyon, a bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya, from Royal Air Force stations in England with the permission of Prime Minister Thatcher. It was a counter-attack by the United States in response to Libyan state-sponsored terrorism directed towards civilians and American servicemen under Muammar Gaddafi, especially the 1986 West Berlin discotheque bombing. On December 21, 1988, Pan American Worldways' Flight 103 from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 189 Americans and 40 Britons on board. The motive that is generally attributed to Libya can be traced back to a series of military confrontations with the United States Navy in the 1980s in the Gulf of Sidra, the whole of which Libya claimed as its territorial waters. Despite a guilty verdict on January 31, 2001, by the Scottish High Court of Justiciary which ruled against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the bomber, on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, Libya never formally admitted carrying out the 1988 bombing over Scotland until 2003. During the Soviet–Afghan War, the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the 1980s provided arms to the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan until the last troops from the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in February 1989. Post-Cold War When the United States became the world's lone superpower after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, new threats emerged which confronted the United States and its NATO allies. With military build-up beginning in August 1990 and the use of force beginning in January 1991, the United States, followed at a distance by Britain, provided the two largest forces respectively for the coalition army which liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's regime during the Persian Gulf War. In the 1997 general election, the British Labour Party was elected to office for the first time in eighteen years. The