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. |
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... army , and in good part a chapter from some Nabokov novel . My family and I were assigned an apartment in a housing complex for American army officers outside Garmisch , near the base of the 1,900 - meter- high Kramerspitze . The first ...
... army , but as a Somali he fell under suspicion and was reduced to private , eventually leaving the army and becoming a game warden in a Ken- yan park on the border with Tanzania . Enough was enough . He crossed the border and made his ...
... army for defense against the Ethiopians was a number of recoilless rifles to be mounted on jeeps . Alas , I told Armacost , when the jeeps arrived in Mogadishu we found that almost all of them had defective engines that could not be ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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