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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... recently moved to Mogadishu from a small southern village . Macpherson and his company were convinced that southern Somalia had considerable untapped potential for rain - fed farming . He was showing Somali farmers how they could raise ...
... Recently the Somali authorities had been talking about the need to convince refugees to settle on the coast and become fishermen . I had , how- ever , looked into what had happened after the previous drought , in 1974–75 , when many ...
... recently , an American consulting group had produced a similar study for an American business group that was interested in putting Ras Hafun back into the salt business but , from what I could gather , had not found the estimated fifty ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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