Safirka: An American EnvoyKent State University Press, 2000 - 241 pages Peter S. Bridges's service as an American ambassador to Somalia capped his three decades as a career officer in the American Foreign Service. Safirka, a frank description of his experiences in Somalia and elsewhere, offers pointed assessments of American foreign policy and policymakers. Bridges recounts his service in Panama during a time of turmoil over the Canal; in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis; in Prague for bleak years after the Soviet invasion; in Rome when Italian terrorists first began to target Americans; and in key positions in three Washington agencies. In Somalia Bridges managed the largest American aid program in sub-Sahara Africa. He dealt with a postcolonial regime, hobbled both by traditional clan rivalries and by a leader who cared far less about Somalia's people and progress than about maintaining his control over that poverty-stricken, strategic - which soon erupted in civil war. |
From inside the book
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... British protectorate . It was from Sheikh , in 1913 , that a reckless British officer named Richard Corfield rode out with a mounted force in search of the “ Mad Mullah , " the greatest figure in Somali history . The so- called Mad ...
... British before the present century be- gan . By 1951 in British Somaliland , which had an area of about 110,000 square miles , there were at least four million sheep and goats and 1.2 million camels ; in contrast , at roughly the same ...
... British agree to give up to Ethiopia a British claim to sixty- seven thousand square miles of the Haud and Ogaden grasslands inhabited by Somali nomads . 1899 Sayid Mohamed Abdallah Hassan , known to the British as the " Mad Mullah ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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