Ambassador Peter Galbraith
Author, policy adviser, former U.S. diplomat
Ambassador Peter Galbraith is an author, politician, and former United States Diplomat. From 1993 to 1998, he served as the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, where he was co-mediator of the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatian War of Independence. He was a cabinet member in East Timor’s first transitional government, successfully negotiating the Timor Sea Treaty. In 2009, Ambassador Galbraith was an Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations serving as Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan. Ambassador Peter Galbraith also served two terms as a Vermont State Senator from Windham County from 2011 to 2015, and was a candidate for Governor of Vermont in 2016.
Beginning in 2003, Galbraith acted as an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq. As an author and commentator, he argued that Iraq has broken up and that the US occupation authorities should not try to build a strong central government over Kurdish objections. In 2009, Galbraith was appointed United Nations’ Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan where he contributed to exposing the massive fraud that took place in the 2009 Afghanistan Presidential Elections.
He is also the author of two critically acclaimed books on the Iraq War, including bestselling The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. In the 1980s, Galbraith uncovered the beginnings of the Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds and, in 1988, documented the use of chemical weapons, leading the U.S. Senate to pass The Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988. Beginning in 2003, Ambassador Galbraith was an informal advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, supporting the Kurdistan delegation in the drafting process of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the research arm of the Council for a Livable World.
Ambassador Galbraith was an assistant professor of International Relations and Economics at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, from 1975 to 1978. Later, he was the professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College in 1999 and between 2001 and 2003. In addition to his books, Ambassador Peter Galbraith has written extensively for a range of publications including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Guardian.
On August 25, 2021, Ambassador Peter Galbraith participated in Afghanistan with Ambassador Peter Galbraith and the Honorable Mike Rogers.
Twitter: @GalbraithforVT
