More on Galbraith; Boston Globe runs the story

Reidar Visser has a new report up on his blog, that summarizes the latest revelations about Galbraith and Kurdish oil made in today’s Dagens Næringsliv, from Oslo.
DN (and from them, Reidar) have reproduced a document attesting that the Connecticut-registered company in which Galbraith has, I believe, a half-share did indeed have a 5% interest in the production-sharing agreement for Kurdistan’s new Tawke oil field.
The Boston Globe has a version of the Galbraith story today, too.
They have a quote there from Juan Cole, even though he hasn’t blogged anything about the Galbraith affair. (Unlike yours truly.)
They also, more importantly, have a quote from Galbraith himself, in which he says,

    “The business interest, including my investment into Kurdistan, was consistent with my political views… These were all things that I was promoting, and in fact, have brought considerable benefit to the people of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan oil industry, and also to shareholders.’’

The Globe reporter, Farah Stockman, then immediately makes this somewhat strange comment:

    It is not illegal or unheard of for former US officials to do business with people they worked with during their time in government. But ethical questions often arise when such dealings become public.

It is, of course, illegal for people who are currently in government jobs to engage in business affairs that might in any way be affected by the decisions they make in an official capacity; and in the US there are well-known regulations regarding how long a person must be out of office before s/he can engage in such business affairs. This is basic to the integrity of government functioning, anywhere.
In 2003-05, when Galbraith was rushing round Iraq and the world arguing passionately for a radical form of Kurdish separation from the central Iraqi state, he was not in fact on the US government payroll. He had been, in late 2002, when he taught at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. But in the 2003-05 period, he was presenting himself as (a) a constitutional affairs specialist, and (b) an adviser to the Kurdish leaders, who was providing his advice to them on a contract or sometimes even “expenses-only” basis because of the depth of his commitment to their cause.
In all the articles he published in the US media in and since those years, arguing for the radical devolution of Iraqi governmental powers to the country’s various ethno-sectarian groups (including the Kurds), not once do I recall having seen it say in the tag-line that he had business interests related to the topics he was writing about.
All those editors just took him at his word when he claimed to be this idealistic, quite disinterested “expert.” He was everyone’s favorite liberal hawk.
Stockman also has this about Galbraith:

    Galbraith said yesterday his role in the [Iraqi] constitutional negotiations was unpaid and informal, and therefore he was under no obligation to disclose his business interests to the US or Iraqi governments. He also said confidentiality agreements prevented him from publicly disclosing details of the business.

Galbraith is, of course, far from the only well-placed US citizen who sought to make some fast money from all the “business opportunities” that the US occupation of Iraq opened up to them. But he seems to have realized that the extremely scuzzy nature of this deal would not look good if held up to the light of day. I’m assuming that it was him, himself, whom the “confidentiality agreements” in question were designed to protect.
Anyway, he should now be asked to abrogate those agreements and come quite clean. I mean, Peter Galbraith does believe in good government, doesn’t he?

NYT studiously ignores Galbraith-DNO link

The NYT today carried a substantial article about the dispute over oil rights between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdish regional government, including many mentions of the oil lease for the KRG’s Tawke field held by the Norwegian company DNO– and they managed to do that without making any mention of the other big aspect of this story that’s roiling the Norwegian press: namely, the fact that the US “cowboy diplomatic advisor” Peter Galbraith has been revealed to be a mystery shareholder in DNO.
Amazing. How could the NYT not mention this– especially given the amount of space the NYT has given to Galbraith’s own views in recent years, both on the op-ed page and as the subject of news articles, including recently?
There truly seems to be (as Reidar Visser and Steve Connors have noted in the comments section of of my earlier post on this topic) some kind of vow of omerta in the US MSM regarding Galbraith’s investing activities and the sharp conflicts of interest involved therein.
in the English-language media, the only other major people to have picked up on the story so far are Michael Rubin of The National Review (here and here) and the always excellent Paul Woodward of War in Context.
Meanwhile, Reaidar Visser has provided us with a fuller translation of the Oct. 10 article about Galbraith from Dagens Næringsliv (DN).
The article puts Galbraith’s involvement in the context of the dispute that has broken out between DNO, the KRG, and some former DNO shareholders, including the Connecticut-registered company “Porcupine”, of which Galbraith is a significant shareholder.
The DN journos have these quotes gathered from Galbraith, as they confronted him in the Norwegian city of Bergen where he has a home along with his Norwegian wife:

    1. “It is well known that I have worked for companies that invest in Iraq. I have pledged to maintain confidentiality concerning these relationships and cannot provide any more information.”
    2. “I have worked with companies investing in Iraq and of course the Kurdish authorities know about my relationships to my clients. That is all I want to say.”

Michael Rubin had done a little digging round and found some paragraphs about Galbraith and his financial interests in Iraqi Kurdistan in this January 2007 Al Kamen piece in the WaPo (scroll down):

    Former ambassador to Croatia Peter W. Galbraith, testifying last week at a Senate hearing about Iraq, noted that he’d been asked by committee staffers to “clarify my relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
    The query probably was sparked by rumors over the years that Galbraith was formally advising the Kurds. His biography is on the KRG’s “Kurdistan, The Other Iraq” Web site, which lists him as an “adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
    In his testimony, Galbraith said he’d “been friends of the Kurdish leaders and for that matter, other Iraqis, for a very long period of time, but I am not in a paid relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
    In an e-mail exchange Friday and Saturday, Galbraith wrote that he hadn’t seen the Web site and “to the extent that it implies a formal relationship with the KRG, it is inaccurate.” Galbraith wrote that he had been paid by “two Kurdish clients” for four months in late 2003-2004 for “either an educational program on negotiations or conducting a negotiation” — all outside this country.
    “I do not lobby or represent anyone in the U.S.,” he wrote, adding that he specifically noted this in his recent book on Iraq and explained there that the KRG has “provided security, accommodation and in-country transportation” when he visits.

So, he did not get paid in cash by the KRG. But was he given the shares in the DNO-KRG deal as some form of “recognition” for the work he did for the KRG?
Definitely worth asking more questions.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, over to you?

RIP Leila Abu-Saba

Leila Abu-Saba was one of the first great American bloggers for Palestinian rights and Arab-Israeli peace. Since early 2004, she used her blog Dove’s Eye View to explore many dimensions of her Lebanese-American heritage, her family life, Lebanese politics, peace issues, identity issues, and from time to time the cancer that started to develop within her shortly after she started blogging.
Recently, she hadn’t been blogging so much. She wrote here, in July, that she’d decided to concentrate on her novel.
Yesterday, she died. You can find a nice, short appreciation of her life and work, here.
She was humane, she was funny, she was inquisitive, and wonderful.
Every so often on her blog, there would be references to her two sons, Jacob and Joseph, now roughly seven and nine years old. On July 23, she posted an adorable picture of the three of them together, here. You’d also sometimes see references to her husband, David, who is Jewish, and the discussions they had about the heritages shared by the family they created.
Oh, here’s a picture of the four of them.
My thoughts are mainly with David, Jacob, and Joseph. (My mother also died when I was eight, after a long illness. It was hard for all of us, including my father.)
Salam, shalom, strength and comfort to the three of them. And thank you, thank you, Leila for all you did.

Turkey’s intriguing diplomacy

Turkey’s adroit and visionary foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and the government he’s a part of, have taken two intriguing moves in recent days:

    1. They canceled an invitation to Israel to take part in five-party air force exercises in eastern Anatolia– and Davutoglu spelled out to CNN that this was because of Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza.
    Congratulations, Turkey!
    2. They also concluded a landmark peace agreement with Armenia. Hillary Clinton rushed in at the last minute to grab a bit of the glory– which I imagine both sides were happy to give her. It is, after all, good to have her and her boss firmly on the record as supporting this deal, which mandates establishment of a joint historical commission to look into the question of the atrocities committed against Armenians in pre-Republic Turkey… But the long hard slog of leading the negotiations was done by Davutoglu and his Armenian counterpart.
    Congratulations, Turkey and Armenia (and Hillary Clinton)!

Regarding the air exercise cancelation, there are a few interesting points:
First, the US, Dutch, and Italian governments got so snitty with the Turkish decision that they decided to cancel their participation in the air exercises, too– thus expressing their “solidarity” with Israel. So Turkey– a full member of NATO– lost out on some training that would probably have been valuable for it, and for NATO.
(Israel, of course, is not a member of NATO. You’d think the US, Netherlands, and Italy might have placed their responsibility to NATO higher than their sentimental attachment to Israel?)
Second, the idea of having Israeli planes practicing air maneuvers etc in a portion of Turkey that’s very close to Iran and could provide one of the transit routes in an Israeli air attack on Iran seems like an unusually strong pander to Israeli militarism, anyway.
Third, the decision seemed to show that the long-running tussle for power between the twice-elected civilian government run by Turkey’s moderately Islamist AK Party and the “secularist-fundamentalists” of Turkey’s military has been resolved, for now, in favor of the civilians. That is good news– for just about everyone except the small coterie of Turkish generals who still long for the repressive policies and unbridled ethnonationalism of the old Kemalist military elite.
Fourth and last, let’s note how principled and effective this Turkish government has been in its approach to the whole Gaza crisis. Turkey, which has fairly longstanding and until recently warm relations with Israel, has long offered to act as an intermediary in the negotiations Israel still desperately needs to have in order to consolidate the still-tenuous ceasefire with Gaza, and to end Israel’s lengthy, quite illegal, and very harmful siege of Gaza. But Israel has always refused this mediation.
Turkey’s government seems more concerned to do something to end the horrific situation of Gazas 1.5 million people than nearly all the Arab governments, combined!
Last year, the Olmert government in Israel did agree to Davutoglu’s offer to arrange, host, and mediate proximity talks with Syria on a possible final peace agreement. Indeed, one of the reasons Davutoglu and his boss, p.m. Rejep Tayyip Erdogan, are so angry with Israel over Gaza these days is because just around Christmas last year, Olmert seemed to promise the Turks that he was “on the brink of a breakthrough” in the talks with Syria.
But then, two days later, Olmert sent waves of bombers from his air force off to start the lengthy series of raids against Gaza that constituted the very punishing first step of the Gaza war… So the Turks, not surprisingly, figured they had been used as patsies in an attempt to distract world attention from what Olmert was, obviously, all the time preparing to do against Gaza. (That feeling was what lay behind the anger Erdogan expressed towards Israeli president Shimon Peres, in Davos, in January.)

Exploring the Geneva Initiative

I have had a bit of time to explore some of the detailed Annexes to the long-running, Swiss-funded peace-visioning project called the Geneva Initiative. You can access them through this portal page. It’s probably good to start with the first PDF file there (“Summary”), and then go to the others for more details as you want them.
These Annexes, which were released last month, build on the general framework for a two-state outcome that was established in the 2003 Geneva Accord. The whole process is a non-governmental one between Israelis and Palestinians. However, the lead Palestinians involved in it have always been people very close to– or actually members of– the Ramallah interim PA government. Most Israeli participants are close to the dovish wing of the Labour Party, or other left parties. So they are considerably further from being able to influence any real current centers of power in Israel than are their Palestinian counterparts.
(On the other hand, for the Palestinians, if the only center of “power” that they are able to influence is the heavily Israel- and US-dependent Ramallah PA, then what real power are we talking about, anyway?)
There are many other power imbalances between the participants from the two sides, too. Primarily, the fact that on one side the participants are citizens of a wealthy independent country and on the other, the participants are citizens of a country under extreme stress and under complete military occupation by the first country. This imbalance underlies everything about the Initiative– including, for example, the fact that all the people who play named functions in it seem to be Israelis. And not just any Israelis, either, but Jewish Israelis. For some reason, it appears that no Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity are included in the Israeli team– despite the fact that these Palestinian Israelis constitute around 20% of the national population; and if they supported a project such as this one they could probably make a particularly helpful contribution.
There are, however, many items of interest in the latest Annexes. Page 17 of the Summary gives you the broad map of the proposed national borders. The Initiative’s approach to borders is that they should be based on the June 4, 1967 line but with mutually agreed land swaps on a 1:1 basis. This map shows you that the land swaps would involve Israel hanging onto most of the big settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem, and to some others near the Green Line in the Northern West Bank and the Latrun salient. The land the Palestinians would get in return would be in the (less developed and more arid) south– both a thickening of the Gaza Strip to the south-east and a little land west of Hebron.
The connector between the West Bank and Gaza that the Initiative envisages would not be counted in the land swap as it would remain under Israeli sovereignty (but have Palestinian administration.)
The border line becomes particularly convoluted as it approaches Jerusalem (see p.53 of the Summary.) On pp.55 and 56 you can see how the planners tried to design ways for Israelis and Palestinians to achieve a reasonable degree of contiguity across some of those salients.
Some of the most interesting parts of the Jerusalem border are where it goes through the Old City, which they propose dividing in the only way that seems reasonable, if there is to be a two-state solution, that is, by giving the Jewish Quarter to the Israeli city of Yerushalayim and the other three quarters to the Palestinian city of Al-Quds (though they would also give Yerushalayim a chunk that i think was part of the historic Armenian Quarter.)
The 13 Annexes include no fewer than three that concern only Jerusalem. One deals with an Inter-Religious Council for the city, another with “The Multinational Presence in Al-Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount Compound” (see its very complicated organization chart on p.77)… and then there is the mapping/town-planning one.
The Water annex– which I am happy to say was negotiated in part at a session hosted by the Annapolis Friends Meeting, in Maryland– does base its approach on the need for “a just and rightful re-division of water resources” between the two countries. However, sadly, when it comes to spelling (p.92) exactly how much water “will become available to the Palestinians” under the agreement, none of the figures have yet been agreed.
Also, I have a concern that spelling it out in that way makes it seem that it would still be Israel that, over all, would control the water resources, doling them out to the Palestinians, rather than the two sides having equal control over shared aquifers.
… If there is to be a two-state outcome, the work in all these annexes will be extremely useful to the negotiators. Two authoritative negotiating teams negotiating in good faith could probably take this set of templates and nail down a final agreement within 2-3 months.
But will that ever happen?
There are problems in generating an “authoritative negotiating team negotiating in good faith” on both sides of the line. But the problems on the Israeli side are far, far greater at this point than those on the Palestinian side since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown no signs whatever that he is prepared to negotiate in good faith. Indeed, his government is continuing to take very widescale actions deep inside the occupied territories that daily make it much harder for him or any subsequent Israeli government to undertake the withdrawal of settlers that would be needed by any two-state agreement.
On the Palestinian side, though many disagreements continue between Fateh and Hamas, the Hamas leadership has stated very clearly for several years now that it is quite prepared to let the Fateh leadership and its allies go ahead and negotiate a two-state peace agreement– provided that any agreement that results is then submitted to a Palestinian-wide referendum. (So yes, the referendum provision does hamper the freedom of the negotiators to give away just any concession they want to to the Israelis. But if they did make more concessions than a subsequent referendum could support, then the agreement would not prove viable over the long run, anyway.)
Similarly, the concessions the Israeli side must make must also be supported in subsequent Israeli elections– and possibly also, specifically, in a referendum.
These political facts, on either side of the line, mean that peace-minded leaders need to be spelling out very explicitly for their people to hear, their compelling vision of the many benefits that peace will bring. Plus, the whole of the international community needs to tell both peoples that there will be tough consequences for not supporting a fairly negotiated agreement.
The Geneva Initiative folks have made an earnest– but, I have to say, not terribly persuasive– attempt to start spelling out their version of the benefits (as well as the nuts-and bolts) of the two-state peace they envision.
Their efforts at “selling the peace” are sometimes quite maladroit. For example, on the Geneva Initiative website, they republish an excerpt from an article by the Nasser Lahham, the chief editor of the Ma’an News Agency, titled “US President Obama Expresses Interest in the Geneva Initiative”…. Which sounds quite upbeat and positive, right?
But if you go to the original article from which these few paragraphs were taken, you’ll see that in that broader context the reference to the Geneva Initiative was a decidedly negative one, from the Palestinian point of view.
The original article, which was published a couple of weeks ago, was titled, “A Palestinian mini-state linked to Iran strike”. The lead was this:

    Israel has been holding secret meetings with Arab leaders over the past several months with the aim of establishing a miniaturized Palestinian state and in hopes of gaining Arab acquiescence in a first strike on Iran.
    According to Ma’an’s well-placed sources, Israeli President Shimon Peres has been the “godfather” of these meetings. Their aim is to “resolve” the Palestinian issue which has dogged Israel for decades and clear the agenda for an attack on Iran.

Now, it is very possible indeed that for the Israeli staff members who seem to control what goes onto the GI website, the idea that their pursuit of the GI could help pave the way for an attack on Iran would be seen as a positive. I know that is absolutely not the case for most Palestinians– and that probably includes most of the ones who work on the GI…
Ah well, I’m not going to tell the people who run the Geneva Initiative how to run their public outreach effort.
I think they’ve done just about everything a non-governmental effort can do to spell out how a two-state solution could be achieved– if indeed it still can be achieved. Which daily looks more and more unlikely.
What’s the game-changer here? My hopes that it might come from Washington have sunk very low in recent weeks. Now, maybe we’ll have to go back to the only remaining game-changer that’s left after Washington disappoints: the UN Security Council.
Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is so important to world peace that it should never have been taken away from the Security Council. It was Henry Kissinger who smurfed it away, really, after the 1973 war and under the guise of the Two-superpower condominium that hosted the 1973 Arab-Israeli Peace Conference in– Geneva. But then he brilliantly out-manipulated Moscow; 16 years later the Soviet Union collapsed; and by then many people around the world thought it was just somehow “natural” that the US should be the party that leads Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
But it’s not “natural” at all. It is most un-natural that a distant government that provides rock-solid partisan support to one side in a dispute should be the main arbiter and leader of all peace efforts involving that side and its opponent. It’s also most un-natural that this arbiter should keep proposing and pursuing actions that are quite contrary to international law– but then be able to enroll the UN itself as a junior partner in the peacemaking…

IPS piece on Abbas’s waning popularity

Oops, I forgot to mention this when it came out, on Friday. But anyway, the piece is here, and also archived here.
The conclusion there:

    there is increasing talk amongst both Palestinians and many Israelis of the possibility of a new intifada. If this does occur, it is most likely to be sparked by the massive wave of colonisation and linked activities the Israeli authorities have been undertaking in East Jerusalem.
    Senior diplomats from neighbouring Arab states have warned that, given Jerusalem’s intense significance for Arabs and Muslims everywhere, the effects of a new, Jerusalem-focused intifada could be felt far beyond Palestine.

Nonsense from Blair

Mondoweiss today gives us a Youtube clip of Tony Blair dodging a tough question from a University of Buffalo student about the Goldstone report.
The student, Nick Kabat, asked Blair why the US and Israel should be allowed to get away with blocking the Goldstone Report, how (as the “Quartet”‘s peace envoy) he could explain that proceeding with Goldstone’s recommendations might harm the peace process, and whether he didn’t think that the blocade on Gaza also harmed the peace process.
You could see Blair ducking and weaving. (The questions had all been pre-screened by the university; but Kabat submitted a bland dummy question then asked this one instead.)
Blair said he’d been to Gaza “twice– in the recent period” and that the situation there is difficult… But you also “have to understand” that Israel has received a lot of rockets from there since it withdrew in 2005 and still has its young soldier Gilad Shalit held there as a prisoner…
No mention from Blair that there have been almost no rockets coming out of Gaza since Hamas announced the currently-operant ceasefire there on January 18– but despite that lack of rocketings, the Israeli siege is harsher even than it was prior to last winter’s war.
No mention of the roughly 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners and detainees being held in Israeli jails. They include more than two dozen elected Palestinian MPs and thousands of others elected for purely political reasons. Shalit, by contrast, was on active military service and thereby knowingly ran the risk of being taken as a prisoner-of-war.
What a dishonest schmuck Blair is. (Nothing new there.)
Then he said that this “situation” could only be resolved through a meaningful peace process that involves action from the top down “and from the bottom up”. This “bottom up” approach is, of course, where he concurs to a large degree with Netanyahu. It involves some elements of Netanyahu’s fallaciously announced “economic peace”, along with a colonial-style approach/argument that the Palestinians somehow “aren’t yet ready for independence”… And thus it will take many more years to painstakingly build Palestinian institutions “from the bottom up” before Tony Blair can even think of “allowing” them to have independence.
So in the meantime, his argument clearly implied, it is really quite alright for the Israelis to continue maintaining their quite inhumane tight siege on Gaza.
He also later said that his best indicator of the “good news from Israel and Palestine” is that he can now travel around the West Bank to cities that previously he was unable to travel to.
Quite unself-consciously! It was just all, quite unabashedly, about him and his freedom to travel.
(And Gaza’s 1.5 million besieged people are supposed to take what kind of comfort from that?)
Memo to the UN Security Council: This guy’s attitudes and policies are actively harmful to the Palestinian people and to world peace. Take him off the job immediately.
Actually, what the Security Council needs to do most urgently is mount its own struggle for independence from US colonialism, as embodied in the whole concept of the UN being subordinate to US leadership in this grotesque body, the so-called “Quartet”, and to leave the Quartet immediately.
Well, either that or reconfigure it to be under the control of the UN, not Washington.

Peter Galbraith, oil contracts, and Kurds

Reidar Visser informs us today that the independent-minded US “free-lance diplomat” Peter Galbraith reportedly, from 2004 through 2008, held a five-percent share in the production-sharing agreement concluded between the small Norwegian private oil company DNO and the Kurdish Regional Government.
Galbraith, a longtime supporter of Kurdish (and before that Croatian) independence, was most recently working as deputy to Kai Eide, the head of the UN’s mission in Afghanistan. Eide fired him last week for, essentially, insubordination.
Back in 2003-05, Galbraith was an influential adviser to the US occupation authorities as they drew up Iraq’s new, heavily decentralized Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) and Constitution, and to various Kurdish political leaders. He was also hailed– and published– by major western news organizations as a credibly neutral (and presumably disinterested) analyst of Iraqi constitutional affairs.
But now it appears that, instead of being the idealist and the brave proponent of the rights of embattled minorities that he had always portrayed himself to be, in reality he was acting as a one-man East India Company, consorting with compliant “locals” (= “natives”) to rip off their country’s resources.
Visser writes,

    Norway’s most respected financial newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv (DN), has been focusing on the operations of DNO,… especially reporting on unclear aspects concerning share ownership and its contractual partnerships related to the Tawke field in the Dahuk governorate. One particular goal has been to establish the identity of a hitherto unknown “third party” which participated with DNO in the initial production sharing agreement (PSA) for Tawke between 2004 and 2008, but was squeezed out when this deal was converted to a new contract in early 2008, prompting a huge financial claim of around 500 million US dollars against DNO which has yet to be settled. Today, DN claims to present proof that one of the two major “mystery stake-holders” involved in the claim was none other than Peter Galbraith, who allegedly held a five-percent share in the PSA for Tawke from June 2004 until 2008 through his Delaware-based company Porcupine… DN has published documents from Porcupine showing Galbraith’s personal signature, and today’s reports are complete with paparazzi photographs of Galbraith literally running away from reporters as they confront him in Bergen, where he is currently staying with his Norwegian wife. He refused to give any comment citing potential legal complications.
    If proven correct, the implications of this revelation are so enormous that the story is almost unbelievable. As is well known, DNO has been criticised for the way its operations in the Kurdistan region interfere with Iraq’s constitutional process. To their credit, though, DNO are at the very least perfectly forthright about their mission in the area: They are a commercial enterprise set up to make a maximum profit in a high-risk area currently transitioning from conditions of war. Galbraith, however, was almost universally seen as “Ambassador Galbraith”, the statesmanlike former diplomat whose outspoken ideas about post-2003 Iraq were always believed to be rooted in idealism and never in anything else. Instead, it now emerges, he apparently wore several hats at the same time, and mixed his roles in ways that seem entirely incompatible with the capacity of an independent adviser on constitutional affairs.

Visser then notes the multiplicity of “hats” that Galbraith was wearing as he strode around post-invasion Iraq in the early years of the US occupation– including “ABC News consultant” (a generously compensated gig, that one usually is), and a compensated consultant for “Kurdish clients”, as well as a constitutional adviser in general and a fairly prolific author of pro-partition analyses.
Visser gives an excellent, detailed analysis of the influence Galbraith claimed he had, and the influence he almost certainly did have, on the drafting of the ‘Transitional Administrative Law’ (TAL) that was imposed on Iraq by Bush appointee Jerry Bremer in March 2004– quoting Galbraith’s own words from the book he published in 2006 that was notably titled The End of Iraq:

    Galbraith urged the Kurds to be maximalist about their demands: “The Bush administration might not like the Kurds insisting on their rights, I said, but it would respect them for doing so (163)”. Then, leading up to the TAL negotiations in the winter of 2004, Galbraith worked specifically for the Kurds in framing their demands. It is very easy to see how the Kurdish gains in the TAL and not least in the 2005 constitution are based on this contribution from Galbraith. Galbraith writes, “On February 10 [2004], Nechirvan [Barzani] convened a meeting at the Kurdistan national assembly of the top leaders of the PUK and KDP. I presented a draft of a ‘Kurdistan chapter’ to be included in the interim constitution [i.e. the TAL]… Except for a few matters assigned to the federal government (notably foreign affairs), laws passed by the Kurdistan national assembly would be supreme within the region. The Kurdistan Regional Government could establish an armed force…The Kurdistan Region would own its land, water, minerals and oil. Kurdistan would manage future oil fields (and keep revenues) but the federal government in Baghdad would continue to manage all oil fields currently in commercial production. Because there were no commercial oil fields within Kurdistan as defined by the March 18, 2003 boundaries, this proposal had the effect of giving Kurdistan full control over its own oil…The permanent constitution of Iraq would apply in Kurdistan only if it were approved by a majority of Kurdistan’s voters (166–67).” Subsequent achievements noted by Galbraith as personal successes include staging the informal 2005 referendum on Kurdish independence (171).
    The influence of Galbraith can be discerned already in the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law (where the principle of residual powers for the provincial entities was put in place), even if Galbraith was dissatisfied with the relatively long list of powers accorded to Baghdad and blamed the “centralising” policies of Paul Bremer and the Bush administration generally for this “defect”. But his hand is even more evident in the 2005 constitution, which combines residual powers for the regions with the supremacy of local law (albeit not if it contradicts the constitution, a “shortcoming” Galbraith later tried to gloss over), and which also specifically mentions the regional right to local armed forces…
    While he was advising the Kurds on the principles of federalism and trying to persuade an American Democratic audience about the virtues of partition as an alternative to the Bush administration policies in Iraq, Galbraith supposedly held a 5 per cent stake in an oil field whose profit potential was directly governed by the constitutional and US policy decisions Galbraith was seeking to influence (his suggestions also included the idea of a permanent US airbase in Kurdistan).Under any circumstances, this new development is likely to strengthen the tendency among Iraqis to be more critical about the details of the 2005 constitution and not least the historical context in which it was conceived – a criticism that even Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki articulated during the run-up to the last local elections. Seemingly, Maliki’s ideas of rectifying this towards greater centralism (i.e. removing some of Galbraith’s pet projects from 2005) have met with success among voters so far.
    Another problem related to this issue is the close association in the past between Galbraith and the apparent Iraq tsar of the current Obama administration, Vice-President Joe Biden…

Visser concludes by noting,

    It is of course somewhat ironic that these revelations should come at a time when Galbraith seems to possess the high moral ground in another controversy also involving Norwegians and Middle Eastern conflicts: The ongoing dispute with UN diplomat Kai Eide over Afghanistan’s elections result.

Personally, I don’t think that Galbraith does occupy the moral high ground in his dispute with Eide. It was a matter of insubordination– by an arrogant American– to his boss within a duly authorized and well-run UN mission. If he disagreed with Eide (as he evidently did) there were things he could do other than try to make end-runs around him.
Anyway, do go read all of Visser’s excellently argued piece there at Historiae. You cannot leave any comments there– but you can at the linked post on his blog. Or, of course, you can leave them here, with a very good chance that Reidar will read them here, too.
By the way, Dagens Næringsliv is apparently going to be publishing follow-up pieces on this matter.

Obama’s Nobel

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today that it’s awarding the 2009 Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama.
The announcement says the award is being given,

    for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
    Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened…
    For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

My first thought on hearing the news was that the award seems a little premature. After all, he hasn’t yet actually made peace anywhere, and his efforts on the Palestinian Question– which he himself launched with such fanfare on his first day in office– have been decidedly disappointing.
On the other hand, his declaration of support for a world free of nuclear weapons was, as the committee noted, a very important step.
When I was working on my 2000 book, The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss our Global Future I surveyed the history of the peace prize and discussed with the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee its philosophy in awarding the prizes. Sometimes, he said, they are awarded for past achievements and sometimes to someone who had started out along a good, though perhaps challenging, peace track. In the latter case, the intent of the award was to encourage this person to continue along the peace track.
The committee has also evidently made a real effort to make the award to people of a variety of different backgrounds and both genders. (Unlike all those numerous hard-science Nobel prizes, awarded by Swedes rather than Norwegians, nearly all of which go to well-funded white male professors at very well-funded big American universities.) It has also sought to establish the linkages between peacemaking/peacebuilding and other concerns such as environmental concerns or the rights of indigenous peoples.
Some of the committee’s decisions– particularly its awards to Henry Kissinger, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat– have been extremely controversial. (To say the least.)
There is also, of course, still a tiny remaining trace of the “rebranding” effort that Alfred Nobel was engaged in when he endowed the prizes. He had made his money largely through production of dynamite; so of course it was a “good” branding move to have his name become much more strongly associated with the concept of peacemaking than that of destruction.
But all these bodies that award big, well-endowed prizes (of which there are these days more than a few) are all also concerned about maintaining the “brand” of their prize. So hitching your prize to the wagon of a figure like Pres. Obama, who is extremely popular everywhere in the world today–except in Israel and among a sector of US society– is also not a dumb move.
Well, I don’t want to seem too grudging toward Obama. Many of the foreign-policy things he’s done in office so far have been admirable, even if his Palestine policy and his Afghan policy have thus far not been. I do hope this award encourages him to be even bolder in his peacemaking and more visionary in his outreach to that 95% of humanity who are not US citizens.
So, congratulations Pres. Obama!

China and the US in Afghanistan

It’s good to put yourself into the shoes of others from time to time. For a while now, I’ve been trying to imagine the conversations that the Central Committee of the Chinese Committee Party doubtless hold from time to time about the various overseas adventures (!) of the US military.
I’m guessing they were intrigued but not, in the circumstances, very surprised by Pres. G.W. Bush’s original decision to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. That invasion brought the US military into a country that shares a short and extremely inhospitable border with China. So the arrival of the US military there– and in various of the other Central Asian Stans that share longer borders with China– must have caused the CCP planners some concern. But the US campaign was wholly focused on Islamist opponents of one variety or another; and it did significantly distract the attention of US military planners from the confrontations they had previously been gaming over in the South China Sea and other areas where China would be the direct target…
(Hainan incident, anyone? That had been GWB’s debut involvement in international affairs, remember.)
So after October 2001, I’m guessing it was “watchful waiting” for the guys in the CCP as they watched the US military maneuvering around the inhospitable mountains of Central Asia.
Then, 18 months later, came the US invasion of Iraq. I’m imagining the guys in the CCP being delirious with delight, toasting Rumsfeld in copious mao-tai or whatever, rubbing their eyes in amazement at just how amazingly stupid the leadership of the US could be!
And then, over the six years that followed, they watched quietly as Washington poured vast amounts of treasure and blood into Iraq in a campaign that very soon started to seriously degrade both the US military and the US economy.
Finally, after the November 2006 elections, Bob Gates’s realism started to pull the US ship of state slowly around from continuing too strongly with that folly.
But then, there was (and still is) the US campaign in Afghanistan.
Now, I’m thinking that the guys in the CCP are having serious second and third thoughts about that. Oh yes, how fabulous (from their POV) to see Washington continuing to degrade the American military and economy even more– over yet another completely un-“winnable” military campaign in a distant-from-the-US Asian country. But there is this other thing the CCP guys very strongly (and probably quite realistically) believe in, which is the deep inter-dependence of the US and China in world affairs.
There’s a portion of the US-China relationship that’s fairly zero-sum-gamey. But there is another portion, which I– and I think they– believe is bigger, which is pretty win-winny (though still not without some elements of competitiveness: sibling rivalry, if you will.)
Win-winning-ness is most evident in the economic relations between the two countries. But it is also present in the need they both share to find a way– preferably, of course, a way that is based neither on confrontation nor on oppression– to deal with various strong currents in the Muslim ummah.
So how long can Beijing go on just watching as the US beats itself to a bloody pulp in Afghanistan? And/or, at what point will the guys in Beijing choose to step in and, first, “offer” their help; or, at a later point, perhaps even start to insist that Washington take it?
Might we be reaching the first of those two points just now?
… From time to time I try to check up on what various Chinese sources are saying about the US’s various military adventures. Which is another way of saying that in between those times, I don’t pay the topic nearly enough attention.
But this week, helpful JWN commenter JohnH directed me to this recent piece in Asia Times, written by a retired, senior Indian diplomat… And that piece then sent me to this important article, authored, as the AT piece says, by deputy general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, Li Qinggong, and published by Xinhua in English on September 28.
Li writes,

    Afghanistan’s political and social turmoil has been aggravated by different intentions of the participating nations that constitute the coalition forces.
    In the short term, the fragile Afghan regime is finding it difficult to tame its restive domestic situation. Still, a prescription could help bring the country out of the mess if key players adopt a peaceful and reconciliatory approach in their push for the end of the war.
    The United States should first put an end to the war. The anti-terror war, which the former US administration of George W Bush launched in 2001, has turned out to be the source of ceaseless turbulence and violence in the past years.
    To promote much-needed reconciliation among the parties concerned, the US should end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting:

    Support from the international community is needed to help Afghanistan make a substantive move toward peace. The international community can take advantage of the ever-mounting anti-war calls within the US to prompt the Obama administration to end the war and withdraw US troops. Germany, France and Britain have planned an international conference this year to discuss the gradual withdrawal of Afghanistan military deployment. International pressures may offer Obama another excuse to withdraw US troops. The UN Security Council should carry the baton from the three European nations to convene a conference on the Afghanistan issue and try to reach a consensus among its five permanent Security Council members and draft a roadmap and timetable for resolution of the thorny issue. In the process, a ticklish issue is whether parties concerned can accept the Taliban as a key player in Afghanistan and how to dispose of the Al Qaeda armed forces, an issue that has a key bearing on the outcome of any international conference on the Afghanistan issue.
    Surely, an international peacekeeping mission is needed in the absence of US troops. With the aid of international peacekeepers, the Afghanistan government and its security forces can be expected to exercise effective control over domestic unrest and maintain peace and security.

So far, this still looks like a very preliminary trial balloon. But it is a trial balloon that this evidently well-connected figure has now gone ahead and floated, in the government’s own English-language media.
It’s one we should all think about.
… Longtime JWN readers will be well aware that one argument I’ve made repeatedly over recent years is that the western nations who constitute NATO are just about the worst instrument one could image for trying to “pacify” Afghanistan; and that if the help of non-Afghan outsiders is needed for this task– as it seems to be– then having the UN play the lead role would be far more effective than imagining that “the west” can do this job alone. (Or, perhaps, at all.)
Just one final note. There’s an ardent young American “COIN”- admirer called Andrew Exum who’s gained some publicity in the past couple of years for the blog he “cheekily” decided to call “Abu Muqawama” (Father of the Resistance). Recently, Exum and his blog got hired by a “liberal hawkish” new think-tank in Washington called the Center for a New American Security, which is famous mainly for the fact that its previous head, Michele Flournoy, is now the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. (Several other previous CNAS people have also gone into the Obama administration. Not, altogether, good news: I have a deep wariness about liberal hawks.)
So anyway, yesterday the breathless young Exum reported on his blog that around the halls of CNAS,

    there is a pretty lively debate among the scholars and staff who work here about whether or not we should continue a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan when we might instead be focusing on preserving our energies for rising powers. Obviously enough, those of us who work on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency feel one way (more or less), while those who work on China and the rest of Asia feel another way (again, more or less… )

This strikes me as an incredibly naive– but also revealing– view. “Rising powers” obviously refers to China. But what still-extant “energies” is he talking about preserving? Energies for fighting China sometime in the future? Can he really mean that?
Also, is he telling us that the people at CNAS who “work on” China are working mainly on thining about plans for a future military confrontation with it? If so, that is very worrying indeed. (But not surprising, all in all, from such a hotbed of liberal hawks.)
But here’s where Exum’s naivete lies. Rather than the US fighting China any time soon (or ever), my judgment is that at some point within the next 4-5 years, the US government will be begging China and the rest of the international community to help it to find a way out of Afghanistan.
Unusually enough, I agree more on this point with Robert Kaplan than I do with Andrew Exum. Kaplan wrote in the NYT yesterday,

    if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Actually, at this point, whether the US stays in Afghanistan or leaves, and whether it “succeeds” there (whatever that means) or doesn’t, then the sheer indisputable fact of the costs the US has paid on account of its two military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past eight years (both initiated by GWB) means that all the elements of US national power have been considerably degraded over the past eight years, while important elements of the national power of China and Russia– I’m not so sure about India– have meanwhile continued on a path of growth.
I guess ever since I did the little bit of research that led to this August 2008 blog post on the sheer size and scope of China’s investments in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve had this idea that one of the main effects of George W. Bush’s two big military (mis-)adventures in distant countries has been to make those countries safe for Chinese mercantilism.
Now there’s irony for you, eh?