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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... thought to myself , I really hated the State Department . I despised its cumbersome bureaucratic organization . At the beginning of the Reagan administration I had written an article for the Foreign Service Journal , under the pseudonym ...
... thought that we had been fools in Vietnam to violate the old dictum that America should never fight a land war in Asia , even though we had done so in Korea . I thought we would be equally foolish to attempt a major campaign in the ...
... thought that Somalia was probably also the Land of Punt , where Egyptians had sailed for ivory , incense , and slaves two thousand years before the Periplus , although other scholars located Punt in what is now Eritrea . Sitting on my ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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