Unintended Consequences: How the Iraq War Hurt America and Helped Its Enemies

In conversation with Mike Shuster, NPR Foreign Correspondent
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
1:03:47
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Episode Summary
A leading authority on Iraq-and architect of the partition plan endorsed by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and many members of Congress-reports on the real consequences of the U.S. invasion.

Participant(s) Bio
Peter W. Galbraith, author of the critically acclaimed The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End, is the leading authority on Iraq and a widely respected commentator on foreign affairs. He is the architect of the partition plan that is considered the main alternative to Bush's Iraq strategy, and which has been endorsed by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, and many members of Congress. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia where he mediated the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. He has held senior positions in the United Nations and, as a cabinet Minister in East Timor's UN-sponsored transitional government, played a key role in that country's emergence as an independent state. He has worked on Iraq for more than 25 years, having uncovered and documented the start of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds in 1987 and his use of chemical weapons in 1988. He was the author of the Senate-passed Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 that would have imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq and was with Kurdish rebels during their doomed 1991 uprising. Galbraith has made more than twenty trips to Iraq since Saddam Hussein's overthrow in 2003, and was a news consultant in Baghdad for ABC news in the chaotic weeks immediately following the regime's collapse.


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