A conversation with Peter Galbraith about Iraq and state building

Geopolitics

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 167-183

  Tuathail, Gearóid Ó ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

STATE BUILDING;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; IRAQ; MIDDLE EAST; WORLD;

EID: 17144399485     PISSN: 14650045     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14650040590907730     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Transcript of the first Gore-Bush Presidential Debate, 3 October 2000, available at (accessed 6 November 2004).
2. Remarks by the president at Victory 2004 Rally, Journal Pavilion, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 1 November 2004, available at (accessed 6 November 2004).
3. 'Afghanistan has never been a homogeneous nation but rather a collection of disparate groups divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious and racial lines and forced together by the vagaries of geopolitics': Larry Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle, WA: University of Washington 2001) p.14.
4. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press 2003).
5. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Updated Edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1998).
6. Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilboren, 'Kerry as the Boss: Always More Questions', The New York Times, 26 September 2004, p.1.
7. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York, Basic Books 2002) pp. 171-246. On 26 March 2003, the Canadian broadcast service devoted a segment of its programme 'The Fifth Estate' to the Kurds and Peter Galbraith's advocacy for them. See .
8. Ibid., p.185.
9. Ibid., p.226.
10. Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers - America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why (New York, Three Rivers Press 1999);
11. David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002).
12. Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin 1996) pp. 143-4.
13. Robert Worth, 'The Other Side of Henry Hyde: Will He Do to Clinton what He Did to Peter Galbraith?', Washington Monthly, 30/11 (November 1998), available at (accessed 6 November 2004).
14. Shawn Donnan, 'East Timorese Accuse Australia of Delay in Boundary Talks', Financial Times, 27 November 2003, p.10.
15. George Packer, 'Dreaming of Democracy', New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2003;
16. Peter Boyer, 'The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz Defends his War', New Yorker, 1 November 2004, pp.46-57.
17. Peter Galbraith, 'Letter', New York Times, 5 February 2003.
18. Craig Smith, 'Threats and Responses: The Opposition; Groups Outline Plans for Governing a Post-Hussein Iraq', New York Times, 18 December 2002.
19. Daniel Williams, 'Blasts Target Iraq's Kurdish Parties', Washington Post, 2 February 2004, p.A1.
20. Peter Galbraith, 'A Hole in the Heart of Kurdistan', New York Times 3 February 2004.
21. Copies of Galbraith's first New York Review of Books article, misleadingly titled 'How to Get Out of Iraq' (it does not address exit strategies in an explicit way), began circulating among military intellectuals in the Pentagon after it appeared. See Thomas E. Ricks, 'Dissension Grows in Senior Ranks on War Strategy: US may be Winning Battles in Iraq but Losing the War, Some Officers Say', Washington Post, 9 May 2004, p.A1.
22. Gearóid Ó Tuathait, 'Theorizing Practical Geopolitical Reasoning: The Case of U.S. Bosnia Policy in 1992', Political Geography. 21/5, pp.601-28.
23. Peter Galbraith, 'How to Get Out of Iraq', New York Review of Books 51/8, 13 May 2004.
24. Galbraith quoted in Packer, 'Dreaming of Democracy' (note 14).
25. Peter Galbraith, "Iraq: The Bungled Transition', The New York Review of Books, 51/14, 23 September 2004.
26. The political ad was produced and paid for by Moveon.org, a progressive pro-Kerry political action committee. Galbraith spoke on the Brian Lehrer show, WNYC, 29 October 2004. An audio archive of the program is available at (accessed 6 November 2004).
27. Peter Galbraith, "Bush's Security Plan now Rests on Nothing but Hope', The Guardian, 11 October 2004, available at (accessed 6 November 2004).
28. Galbraith, 'How to Get Out of Iraq' (note 20).
29. Galbraith, 'Iraq: The Bungled Transition' (note 22).
30. Galbraith, 'How to Get Out of Iraq' (note 20).
31. I b i d.
32. I b i d.
33. Leslie Gelb, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, shares Galbraith's analysis of the fatal flaw in US strategic thinking: the commitment to a unitary Iraq. In November 2003 he argued that the United States should move towards a three-state solution in Iraq, with a regional confederation first and independence later. Somewhat confusingly he uses Yugoslavia as an analogy writing that when Tito died in 1980, 'several parts of Yugoslavia quickly declared their independence'. This is historically inaccurate and since Yugoslavia collapsed in a most bloody manner, it is hardly an inspired example. Yugoslavia was never a confederation (though this was under discussion and was the lead option of the Slovenes in 1988; see Hayden) nor could it be described as a 'three-state strategy'. Gelb's argument relies on primordialist assumptions about 'natural states' and 'natural pasts'. He proposes a cartographic fix for Iraq, with 'boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines'. He also suggests population transfers which he acknowledges would be a 'messy and dangerous enterprise'. The strategic value to the United States of the three-state solution is that it would allow the United States to draw down its troops from the Sunni Triangle, and hand it over to the United Nations. It could then withdraw to the more stable regions in the north and south. He concludes that 'Washington would have to be very hard-headed to engineer this breakup. But such a course in manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq's future in its denied but natural past.' Leslie Gelb, 'The Three State Solution', New York Times, 25 November 2003, pA27. See also Robert Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1999). In an opinion editorial from May 2004 Gelb modifies his argument to emphasise a power-sharing confederation not three states as a solution. See also Robert Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1999). In an opinion editorial from May 2004 Gelb modifies his argument to emphasise a power-sharing confederation not three states as a solution. Leslie Gelb, 'Power-sharing a Solution', The Australian, 26 May 2004, p. 13.
34. Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York, Random House 2002).
35. See William Langewiesche, 'Welcome to the Green Zone: The American Bubble in Baghdad,' Atlantic Monthly, November 2004.
36. For a discussion of the validity of these parallels see Ray Salvatore Jennings, After Saddam Hussein: Winning a Peace If It Comes to War US Institute of Peace Special Report 102, February 2003, available at (accessed 10 November 2004).
37. In November 2004, Sunni insurgents fleeing from the US army attempt to control Falluja opened up a new insurgency front in the city of Mosul. Coalition supported Iraqi police units fled and with US forces stretched thin, the 'Iraqi government' deployed 'Iraqi National Guard' units to the city. So pervasive was this grammar of unified Iraqi state institutions acting that one had to read press accounts very closely before grasping that, in actuality, Kurdish pershmerga forces had been sent into the Sunni section of Mosul. With Kurdish forces employed by the Americans to suppress Sunni insurgents, Galbraith's fears seem well placed. See Edward Wong and James Glanz, 'Rebels Attack in Central Iraq and the North', New York Times, 16 November 2004, pp.A1, 10.
38. On Kirkuk see George Packer, 'The Next Iraqi War? What Kirkuk's Struggle to Reverse Saddam's Ethnic Cleansing Signals for the Future of Iraq', The New Yorker, 4 October 2004, pp.64-99. Saddam's Ethnic Cleansing Signals for the Future of Iraq'
39. Robert Kaplan, 'Barren Ground for Democracy', New York Times, 14 November 2004.
40. Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Prineton University Press 2004).