A volatile mixture
Toolbox
Published: November 14, 2009
Vermonters have followed the career of Peter Galbraith with interest because he is a resident of Townshend who, no matter how many air miles he has logged as a diplomat, continues to maintain his connections with his home state.
He was the nation's first ambassador to Croatia. He was a stout defender of the Kurds when they were undergoing genocidal persecution by Saddam Hussein. He served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And lately he was the top assistant to the head of the United Nations mission to Afghanistan.
Before all that, back in the 1970s, he was chairman of the Vermont Democratic Party. More recently, he flirted with the idea of challenging Gov. James Douglas as a Democrat running for governor.
In all of these positions he has established a reputation as a bold and outspoken defender of human rights. That's why the recent news accounts that his work for a Norwegian oil company in Iraq could net him more than $100 million are dismaying.
The question that those sympathetic to Galbraith are asking themselves is: Do his activities pass the Cheney test? What if former Gov. Dick Cheney had scored $100 million in an interlude of private sector work in a nation where he had been involved on behalf of the U.S. government?
In fact, after his tenure as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney became a rich man working for Halliburton, the oil services company and defense contractor. When Cheney became vice president, his connections in the private sector cast a long shadow over his government service.
According to reports in The New York Times, Galbraith helped negotiate a contract allowing the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in a promising region of Kurdistan. At the time he was working as a private citizen for DNO.
It so happened that before DNO struck oil in 2005 Galbraith had helped the Kurds secure provisions in the Iraqi constitution giving them control of the oil found on their territory. Galbraith had long been an advocate for the Kurds, and he has acknowledged that he had maintained a business relationship with DNO during the constitutional negotiations in Iraq.
Galbraith says there was no conflict of interest because his advocacy on behalf of the Kurds and his work for DNO were well known and "congruent." He says he undertook business activities "entirely consistent with my long-held policy views."
News reports about Galbraith's business dealings surfaced first in the Norwegian press shortly after Galbraith was dismissed by the United Nations from his posting in Afghanistan, where he worked under the U.N.'s chief of mission, the Norwegian diplomat, Karl Eide. It's reasonable to surmise that someone was leaking information about Galbraith as retribution for his harsh words about the U.N.'s work in Afghanistan.
The way Galbraith portrays the situation, everybody knew everything about his work for the Kurds and his work for DNO and so suggestions that there was a conflict of interest qualify as "innuendo." And yet the Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shiite elements and which has still not resolved its differences with the Kurds about oil, views Galbraith's oil activities dimly. An Iraqi member of Parliament who is vice chairman of the oil and gas committee was quoted in The New York Time saying that Galbraith's "interference" in constitutional negotiations "was not justified, illegal and not right."
Galbraith's high positions in government and the potential for making big money may have blinded him to the implications of his actions. In Cheney fashion, he may be guilty of hubris. His flirtation with a run for governor of Vermont carried with it a touch of arrogance — as if he believed he could drop in on the state where he had lived part-time and take over its political affairs. And arrogance has its perils.
Galbraith is now in a position to retreat to Townshend to write another book about the world events in which he has been embroiled. He has been a strong voice on behalf of the oppressed, and that voice is not likely to be stilled by leaks and political payback. But the mixture of big money and public service is a volatile one, and now he has been singed.
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