Galbraith, Peter W. 1950-

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Galbraith, Peter W. 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born 1950; son of John Kenneth (an economist and politician) and Catherine Galbraith; married Tone Bringa (an anthropologist); children: three. Education: Harvard College, A.B., 1973; Oxford University, M.A.; Georgetown University Law Center, J.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Townshend, VT. Office—Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, 322 4th St. N.E., Washington, DC. 20002.

CAREER:

Diplomat. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, senior advisor, 1979-93, handled Foreign Relations authorization legislation and the Near East/South Asia region; first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, 1993-98, principal architect of the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the war in Croatia; National War College, Washington, DC, professor of national security strategy, 1998-99 and 2001-03; United Nations Transitional Administration, East Timor, director for political, constitutional and electoral affairs, 2000-01, designed the territory's first interim government; news consultant in Iraq for American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 2003; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Washington, DC, senior diplomatic fellow; principal at Windham Resources Group LLC. Also member of U.S. delegation to the thirty-fifth United Nations General Assembly, 1980, and tenth and eleventh United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Governing Councils.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Awarded Pakistan's Sitari-i-Quad-i-Azam, in recognition of his work to promote human rights and the restoration of democracy in that country; has also received awards for his work to protect the international environment and to promote international educational exchange.

WRITINGS:

The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations reports. Contributor to New York Review of Books.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter W. Galbraith, a longtime member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, is the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End. In the work, Galbraith, who has also served as a political adviser to the Kurdish leadership in Iraq, argues that the U.S. government should abandon its policy of creating a multiethnic democracy in the war-torn nation and instead promote a confederation of independent Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia states. According to Library Journal contributor Zachary T. Irwin, Galbraith "emphasizes the conflict between the reality of a deeply divided post-Saddam Iraq and the Bush administration's assumption that a unified democratic state might be cobbled together." Though New York Times Book Review critic Noah Feldman stated that Galbraith's proposal "does absolutely nothing to address the present violence in the country," he did acknowledge that the author's "opinion needs to be taken very seriously," and Michael M. Gunter, writing in the Middle East Journal, observed that Galbraith "makes many valid and disturbing points that need to be aired." "Galbraith knows Iraq, knows what went wrong, and shows us," wrote Jonathan Morrow in the Melbourne Age. "And it is a timely account: as Iraq's disintegration becomes luridly visible, this is the book that provides the real-time autopsy. In passing, one also gets a sense of how Iraq might have been managed had there been a U.S. presidency receptive to Galbraith's peculiar combination of human rights activism and aggressive strategic realism." Reviewing The End of Iraq in the National Catholic Reporter, Phillip P. Henderson concluded: "Peter Galbraith's learned and insightful book is literally a must-read for those who wish to place the Iraq war in historical context and to understand the forces at play in what may well be the dissolution of Iraq."