Although it has been widely stated that the Tibetans submitted about 1207 to Chinggis (Genghis) Khan to avert an invasion, evidence indicates that the first military contact with the Mongols came in 1240, when they marched on central Tibet and attacked the monastery of Ra-sgreng and others.
In the middle of dinner, a call came through from Alexander Haig, secretary of state in Reagan's administration, to say that, after speaking at length to the Argentinian dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri, he could see no way of averting the invasion.
It led to cooperation with Israel in cold-war days; it ended the Iraq war; it averted an invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 after Iranian diplomats were murdered; it brought post-9/11 cooperation with America on Afghanistan; it explains the ebb and flow of liberalization since 1979; and it makes sense of the Jewish presence.
Few were prepared to accept that Jaruzelski had acted only to avert a Soviet invasion.
He helped to defuse growing nuclear tensions in Korea, then narrowly to avert a US invasion of Haiti in 1994, as well as leading conflict mediation and election-monitoring efforts around the world.
For conservatives in Poland, at least, this is a substitute for the charge they say General Jaruzelski should face -- declaring martial law in 1981 to crush the Solidarity trade union -- a charge from which the general was exempted by post-Communist Parliaments and a decision he has always defended as necessary to avert a Soviet invasion.
Martial law, which was suspended a year later, may have averted a Soviet invasion, but it hardly solved the government's problems.
And Mr. Hussein himself -- just as the White House predicted -- has begun blowing up a few Al Samoud missiles in hopes of averting an American invasion.
Allying himself with John, Pandulph used ecclesiastical censures, including excommunication, to avert a threatened French invasion of England and suspended Archbishop Langton for refusing to excommunicate the barons and for extracting the Magna Carta (charter of liberties) from the king (June 19 , 1215.
By this time French victories in Switzerland and Holland had averted the danger of invasion, and the counterrevolutionary risings within France had more or less failed.
