Peter W. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia and has held senior positions in the US Government and the United Nations. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006). Currently, he is the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a principal at the Windham Resources Group LLC.
As U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, Galbraith was actively involved in the Croatia and Bosnia peace processes. He was co-mediator and principal architect of the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the war in Croatia by providing for peaceful reintegration of Serb-held Eastern Slavonia into Croatia.
During the war years, Ambassador Galbraith was responsible for U.S. humanitarian programs in the former Yugoslavia and for U.S. relations with the UNPROFOR mission headquartered in Zagreb. Ambassador Galbraith's diplomatic interventions facilitated the flow of humanitarian assistance to Bosnia and secured the 1993 release of more than 5,000 prisoners of war held in inhumane conditions by Bosnian Croat forces.
Galbraith helped devise and implement the strategy that ended the 1993-94 Muslim-Croat War and participated in the negotiation of the Washington Agreement that established the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was co-chairman of the Croatia peace process ("the Z-4 process") that produced several agreements between the Croatian government and rebel Serbs. From 1996 to 1998, Ambassador Galbraith served as de facto Chairman of the international commission charged with monitoring implementation of the Erdut Agreement.
From January 2000 to August 2001, Ambassador Galbraith was Director for Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). He also served as Cabinet Member for Political Affairs and Timor Sea in the First Transitional Government of East Timor. In these roles, he designed the territory's first interim government and the process to write East Timor's permanent constitution.
Ambassador Galbraith conducted successful negotiations with Australia to produce a new treaty governing the exploitation of oil and gas in the Timor Sea. The resulting Timor Sea Treaty will double the GNP of East Timor, and is believed to be the first time the United Nations has a negotiated a bilateral treaty on behalf of a state. He also led the UNTAET/East Timor negotiating team during eighteen months of negotiations with Indonesia aimed at normalizing relations and resolving issues arising from the end of the Indonesian occupation.
From 1979 to 1993, Galbraith was a senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with major responsibilities for the Near East and South Asia, international organizations, and the Foreign Relations Authorization legislation. Galbraith is the author of published Foreign Relations Committee reports on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqi Kurds, US-India relations, Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia, and the Cambodian famine.
In the late 1980s, Galbraith helped expose Saddam Hussein's murderous "al-anfal" campaign against the Iraqi Kurds. He documented Iraqi chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villagers and the depopulation of rural Kurdistan in reports published by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His work on the Kurdish issue led the US Senate to pass comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in 1988. During the 1991 uprising, Galbraith travelled throughout rebel-held northern Iraq, narrowly escaping across the Tigris as Iraqi forces recaptured the area. His written and televised accounts provided early warning of the catastrophe overtaking the civilian population and contributed to the decision to create a safe haven in northern Iraq. In 1992, Galbraith brought out of northern Iraq 14 tons of captured Iraqi secret police documents detailing the atrocities against the Kurds. Galbraiths work in Iraqi Kurdistan is chronicled in Samantha Powers Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), and was the subject of a 1992 ABC Nightline documentary.
From 1998 to 1999, and from 2001 to 2003, Ambassador Galbraith was a Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College in Washington, DC. In April 2003, he was an ABC news consultant arriving in Baghdad four days after the first American troops. .He is the author of numerous articles on Iraq, including six widely discussed articles in the New York Review of Books: "How to Get Out of Iraq" (April 2004) and "Iraq: Bungled Transition" (September 2004), "Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic" (August 2005) and "Last Chance for Iraq" (October 2005) and "Bremer's Mess" (March 2006). His book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, (Simon and Schuster), was released July 11, 2006.
Pakistan decorated Galbraith with its high civilian award, the Sitari-i-Quad-i-Azam, in recognition of his work to promote human rights and the restoration of democracy in that country. In her autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto credits Galbraith's with securing her freedom in 1984 following three years imprisonment.
Galbraith was a member of the U.S. delegation to the 35th United Nations General Assembly (1980) and the 10th and 11th United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Governing Councils. He also served as a senior legal advisor to UNEP helping draft treaties on biological diversity and environmental impact assessment. He has received awards for his work to protect the international environment and to promote international educational exchange.
Ambassador Galbraith holds an A.B. from Harvard College, an M.A. from Oxford University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. He is married to Dr. Tone Bringa and has three children. He lives in Vermont.