Huffington Post: Two Leading Iraqi Kurdish Groups Fighting The Islamic State To Be Taken Off U.S. Terror List

Posted: 12/16/2014 11:03 am EST Updated: 12/16/2014 11:59 am EST
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: akbar.ahmed@huffingtonpost.com
Sophia Jones: sophi.jones@huffingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON — Two of the leading political parties representing the Middle East’s stateless Kurdish population will soon be removed from a U.S. list of potential terrorist groups, in a move that U.S. and Kurdish officials say will resolve a long-standing dispute between Washington and a community that has proven to be one of its favored partners in the region, most recently in the fight against the militant group known as the Islamic State . . .

Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat and adviser to the Iraqi Kurds, criticized what he called the Obama administration’s “lack of courage” for not acting to make the fix sooner through executive action.

Click the link to read the article in its entirety.

 

The New Yorker: The Fight of Their Lives

The White House wants the Kurds to help save Iraq from ISIS. The Kurds may be more interested in breaking away.

By Dexter Filkins
September 29, 2014 Issue

The history of the Kurds’ relationship with the United States is a series of swings between rescue and abandonment, and, as a consequence, between gratitude and distrust. In early 1987, when Peter Galbraith was a young staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he and a group of colleagues went on an official visit to Iraq. The itinerary, Galbraith recalled recently, took him to Iraq’s Kurdish region. As he and a government escort drove through the countryside of northern Iraq, Galbraith was struck by a string of empty villages, some of which were being bulldozed. Other villages, designated on American military maps, had vanished. Galbraith wasn’t allowed to get out of the car to investigate. “It was shocking,” Galbraith said. “Nobody knew what was happening.”

Link to read the entire article.

ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): New Prime Minister may not be enough to solve Iraqi crisis

New Prime Minister may not be enough to solve Iraqi crisis

Updated Fri at 2:00pmFri 15 Aug 2014, 2:00pm

Iraqi analyst Peter Galbraith says Nouri al-Maliki’s decision to step aside as prime minister in favour of his Shiite Dawa party colleague Haider al-Abadi is unlikely to help solve the crisis facing Iraq. The former US ambassador to Croatia, who has a long career in conflict resolution, says the only way to defeat Islamic State militants is with a ground force.

Please click on this link to hear this broadcast in its entirety and / or to print a transcript.

Rudaw: Window on Westminster

by Gary Kent
July 20, 2014

Peter Galbraith was part of the debate on Kurdish options which aired twice last week in the Commons . . .

Peter Galbraith, a long-term Kurdophile and former US Ambassador to Croatia, was uninhibited in advocating Kurdish independence. He has seen for himself the consequences of trying to hold countries together when nations inside want to leave. He said that the big mistake in Yugoslavia was trying to keep it intact when the Croatians and Slovenians wanted out. The west should have concentrated on preventing war rather than a false or forced territorial integrity.

Click on this link to read the article in its entirety.

 

VPR Interview: Kurdistan’s Position In A Fragile Iraq

http://digital.vpr.net/post/interview-kurdistans-position-fragile-iraq

Interview: Kurdistan’s Position In A Fragile Iraq

By PATTI DANIELS

Peter Galbraith of Townshend has spent much of the last 30 years working closely with Kurds in northern Iraq as that region has tried to create a path to independence from the rest of the country. A former diplomat, Galbraith is in Kurdistan working as an advisor to Kurdish leaders.

Galbraith is the author of the 2006 book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End. He spoke with Vermont Edition about his perspective on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Maliki government and whether Iraq will remain a unified country.

Listen

VPR: Vermont Edition – Peter Galbraith provides an update from Iraq

Vermont State Senator Peter Galbraith provides an update from Iraq on the latest developments in that country.

This interview will be broadcast on VPR  (Vermont Public Radio) – Vermont Edition at noon and at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday June 26, 2014. You can go to Vermont Edition at http://digital.vpr.net/programs/vermont-edition to listen to this interview. This segment is after “Rental Discrimination by the Numbers”.

 

USA Today: Columnist’s Opinions

Can Kerry Help Contain Growing Iraq Crisis?
Opinionline

Posted 7:12 p.m. EDT  
June 24, 2014

What people are saying about how to combat Sunni insurgency . . .

 

Peter Galbraith, Politico:

“The United States should stop asking the Kurds to help save Iraq because Iraq is not saveable, and, if it were, the Kurds would not want to save it. Instead, the critical U.S. interest has now become stopping the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria. If ISIS is not defeated, there will be in western Iraq and eastern Syria a transnational terrorist state controlling large cities and with vast recruiting potential. Seen in this context, U.S. diplomatic recognition of an independent Kurdistan has become a very small price to pay.”

 

Click on this link to read the article in full.

The Huffington Post – The World Post

Gertrude of Arabia and Her Kurdish Mistake

By Stanley Weiss
Posted: 06/23/2014 3:34 pm EDT  |  Updated: 06/23//2014  4:59 pm EDT

 

Excerpt:

It’s a stark reminder — despite the hand-wringing of a foreign-policy establishment that diplomat and scholar Peter Galbraith rightly calls “professionally committed to the perpetual existence of every country on the map” — that Iraq as it is presently constituted has had only a brief and haphazard existence.

 

Read article in its entirety using this link.

Global Post: Middle East

Maybe the World Should Just let Iraq Split Apart
It’s been in the cards for a long time.

By Jean MacKenzie
June 20, 2014 16:54

Excerpt:

Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat who acted as an advisor to the Kurdish government in 2003, also argued against keeping Iraq together by force.

 

Use this link to read the article in its entirety.

Reprinted on The Moderate Voice.

Los Angeles Daily News: Nation and World

The 5 Big Winners in Iraq, Land of Opportunity
By Jean MacKenzie, Global Post
Posted 06/23/14, 7:54 AM PDT

Excerpt:

“They are not reconcilable,” said Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and author of the book “The End of Iraq.” “There is no common ground. Both sides want to run Iraq and each side wants to exterminate the other.”

Link to read the article in its entirety.