Peter W. Galbraith

Peter Woodard Galbraith (born December 31, 1950) A.B., M.A., J.D. is a former United States diplomat. He is the son of John Kenneth Galbraith and Catherine (Kitty) Atwater Galbraith. Peter Galbraith holds degrees from the Commonwealth School, Harvard College, Oxford University and Georgetown University Law Center.

Galbraith worked for Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, and served on the staff of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993, where he published many reports about Iraq and took a special interest in Kurdistan. In 1993, he was appointed the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton. In 1995, he was the co-mediator and principal architect of the Erdut Agreement that ended the war in Croatia by providing for the peaceful reintegration of Serb-held Eastern Slavonia. He later served with the United Nations in East Timor, where he was head of the UNTAET political section and Cabinet Member for Political Affairs and Timor Sea in East Timor's first Transitional Government. He was East Timor's lead negotiator for maritime boundaries with Australia and produced two agreements, including the 2002 Timor Sea Treaty, that effectively quadrupled East Timor's share of the petroleum resources between the two countries. He taught at the National War College (1999, 2001-2003).

Galbraith favors the independence, real or de facto, of Kurdistan, and has worked with Kurdish leaders, including Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, toward that end. In 2003, he resigned from U.S. government after 24 years of service in order to be able to criticize U.S. Iraq policy more freely.

Currently senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Galbraith is the author of "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End" (2006), which argues that the U.S.'s "main error" in Iraq has been "wishful thinking" and advocates acceptance of a "partition" of Iraq into three parts as part of a new U.S. "strategy based on the reality of Iraq" (pp. 4, 12, 222, 224). He has also written extensively on Iraq in the pages of the "New York Review of Books".

He and his wife, the Norwegian social anthropologist Tone Bringa, have three children and a home in Townshend, Vermont.

Galbraith was also a good friend of Benazir Bhutto, tracing from their student days at Harvard University, and was quite instrumental in Bhutto's release from prison in Pakistan for a medical treatment abroad during the regime of General Zia Ul-Haq.

On January 17, 2008 he announced that he is considering a run for the governorship of Vermont. He would run as a Democrat against the incumbent Republican governor Jim Douglas and Progressive Anthony Pollina in the 2008 elections. [http://burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080117/NEWS02/801170305/1007]

Writings

* Galbraith, Peter (2006), "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End"; Simon and Schuster. ISBN-10: 0743294238

External links

* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/10454 Peter W. Galbraith]
* [http://www.salve.edu/pellcenter/functions/biography_detail.cfm?bio_ID=43 Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith]
* [http://ourworldinbalance.blogspot.com/2007/09/story-of-peter-w-galbraith.html The Story of Peter W. Galbraith] by Our World in Balance