WASHINGTON INSIGHT

APRIL IN MOGADISHU: Remember the rap against April Glaspie? That as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, she didn’t stand up to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein just before his troops invaded Kuwait? Well, what better way to save a career that’s been nose-diving ever since than to face down a group of Somali warlords? Sources say Glaspie, now a U.N. political aide in Mogadishu, persuaded a dozen of them to disarm after the U.N. attack on warlord Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid. . . . Glaspie went looking for work in Somalia after Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, refused to keep her on at the New York mission. Before that, Glaspie was forbidden by State Department officials to talk either to the press or to Congress about her ill-fated talks with Hussein, even as friends insisted she had actually taken a hard line--and was being made a scapegoat for the failed Mideast policies of the Bush Administration. . . . Now her career is looking up again: She will return to Washington soon to head the State Department’s office of southern African affairs.