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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... miles down the coast southwest from Mogadishu , Kismayu was thirty miles beyond the equator , and the Kenyan border was a hundred miles beyond Kismayu . Somalia was a large country , twice as large as Italy , although its population was ...
... miles by sea from Baluchistan , in southern Pakistan , the likely site of confrontation with the Soviet Army if it moved toward the sea . Yet Baluchistan was only four hundred miles from the nearest railhead and supply bases inside the ...
... miles from east to west , ten miles north to south , and stands almost detached from the mainland . At the northwest end 6. David Korn , who was our chargé d'affaires in Ethiopia from 1982 to 1985 , has de- scribed in his Ethiopia , the ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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