NY Review
Volume 51, Number 8 · May 13, 2004
How to Get Out of Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith
The best hope for holding Iraq together—and thereby avoiding civil
war—is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to
the extent possible, the system each wants. This, too, suggests
the only policy that can get American forces out of Iraq.
In the north this means accepting that Kurdistan will continue to
govern its own affairs and retain responsibility for its own
security. US officials have portrayed a separate Kurdistan defense
force as the first step leading to the breakup of Iraq. The Kurds,
however, see such a force not as an attribute of a sovereign state
but as insurance in case democracy fails in the rest of Iraq. No
one in Kurdistan would trust an Iraqi national army (even one in
which the Kurds were well represented) since the Iraqi army has
always been an agent of repression, and in the 1980s, of genocide.
The Kurds also see clearly how ineffective are the new security
institutions created by the Americans. In the face of uprisings in
the Sunni Triangle and the south, the new Iraqi police and civil
defense corps simply vanished.
Efforts to push the Kurds into a more unitary Iraq will fail
because there is no force, aside from the US military, that can
coerce them. Trying to do so will certainly inflame popular
demands for separation of the Kurdish region in advance of
January's elections.
----
NY Times, November 12, 2009
U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits
By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS
OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American
ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views
of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the
summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional
government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive
talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its
vast oil wealth.
Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth
Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more
dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations
with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he
helped the Kurds extract.
In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram
through provisions that gave their region — rather than the
central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their
internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give
the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on
their territory.
Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold
foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid
adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms
about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq
is known.
---
NY Review
Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009
On Peter W. Galbraith
November 18, 2009
The New York Times and other newspapers have reported that Peter
W. Galbraith, who has written about Iraq in these pages, has been
involved in financial activities concerning Kurdistan's oil
resources. Mr. Galbraith has been identified in the Review's
contributors' notes as a "principal at the Windham Resources
Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in
post-conflict societies, including Iraq," and as having
"participated in many of the discussions surrounding the writing
of the Iraqi constitution." We regret that we were not informed of
Mr. Galbraith's financial involvements in business concerning
Kurdish oil. If we had known about them, we would have wanted them
to be disclosed when his articles were published.
The Editors
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