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
Results 1-3 of 26
... stopped regularly for a day at Cristobal so their passengers could tour and shop in Colon . But after 1945 , Canal employment had dropped sharply and the cruise ships had stopped coming . Colon had From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus 21.
... stopped flying to Somalia , after Somali debts to the airline reached a point that Alitalia's chairman , Umberto Nordio , found in- tolerable . He was pressured , he told me later , by the Italian government to keep on flying to the ...
... stopped . In the case of Somalia , the fighting had not stopped , and it was not a conflict be- tween countries ; it was civil war . The question was therefore one of peace- making before peacekeeping and of international involvement in ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
13 other sections not shown