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An interview with Peter Galbraith
5.12.2006
By MARY JO PHAM |
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December 5, 2006
Sabis International Charter School
Q. At what age did you become interested in
politics?
Galbraith: I
grew up in a family that was concerned with public
affairs, so I suppose I was interested in politics
from such a young age that I can't remember when I
was first interested. Certainly well before I was
10. I started working for the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in 1979 when I was 28 years old.
Growing up did you have a mentor or a role model to
reflect your politic interests? Well, I suppose I
had a mentor and role model in my father, John
Kenneth Galbraith. He served as President Kennedy's
ambassador to India. So as a child, I went with him
to India. So that was where I learned a lot. The
only discussion we had (at dinner) was about public
issues, politics and international relations. I
suppose there might have been a cursory "How was
school today?" but if you answered in more than a
sentence I think the subject quickly turned. So it
was fascinating, we had presidential candidates at
the dinner table and foreign leaders. I remember
once, the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew,
came to dinner because he wanted to study. My father
did a a little tutorial for him.
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Former U.S. State Department Official, Peter
Galbraith |
Q. It's often difficult to get two people to
agree with each other, let alone two countries. So
how did you keep a positive mentality and manage to
mitigate the conflict as ambassador to Croatia?
Galbraith: Well,
there's a saying that pessimism is for diplomats
what cowardice is for soldiers. So, no matter how
grim the situation, it's important as a diplomat to
try and be optimistic about your ability to solve it
and keep at it. Because the alternative to that, is
war. I think that that's particularly true when
you're trying to mitigate a conflict to which you're
not a party. The United States was not a party in
the conflict between the Croats and the Serbs and
the conflict in Bosnia. We were a mediator and we
had a lot of power as a mediator because we're a
powerful country. But, in the end, it was their
conflict. Yeah, of course there were times when
people were discouraging. But looking back, one has
a greathugesense of satisfaction because, in fact,
we did end the war.
Q. There are millions suffering and dying in
Darfur. What is your opinion of the conflict there?
Galbraith: We
have to have some lessons from genocides past. It is
important to recognize them early. We have a common
human obligation to fellow human beings that they
not be wiped out solely because of their race or
ethnicity or religion or political beliefs. Genocide
is the most horrible of all crimes. The other point
I would make is that any attention and any action
can make a difference. Of course at the extreme
level, military intervention maybe required to stop
genocide. That is what we did in Kosovo and that's
what we should have done in Rwanda. Now another case
I was involved in, in the 1980s, I stumbled across
Saddam's genocide against the Kurds, which included
the destruction of villages and the use of poison
gas. And in September 1988, I wrote a bill that the
Senate passed called the Prevention of Genocide Act
of 1988 with complete sanctions on Iraq. It did not
become law because of opposition from the Reagan
administration. Ironically, many of the same people
who are in the current Bush administration who
argued that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds was a
reason for war [recently], at the time he was
gassing the Kurds, they were officials in the Reagan
administration and they opposed, even economic
sanctions. And that was two extremes. The
interesting thing is that the act of having
introduced this bill and having gotten it through
the Senate, after that Iraq stopped using chemical
weapons. So even that made a difference though the
genocide continued in other ways. So with regard to
Darfur, international attention, sanctions and
military action are all appropriate responses.
Q. What do you think is keeping
administration officials and people in the
government from responding?
Galbraith: Iraq
is what keeps them from doing anything. What do you
think young people should do young people who are
interested in government, in human rights what
should we do collectively about Darfur? I think
almost everything is useful. I think demonstrations,
writing your members of congress, writing letters to
the editor of the newspaper. Politicians and policy
makers do respond to public pressure. Writing to the
government of Sudan. These are all effective steps.
In the end, of course, it requires governments to do
something, but raising the issuethis is what you can
do and it can help.
Q. Do you think, today, the U.S. has placed
less value on human rights, or have we done a better
job in supporting people and their human rights?
Galbraith: I
think human rights is now more widely accepted as an
American value and an important goal in the U.S.
Foreign policy. One reason, of course, that it is
because the end of the Cold War made it less
necessary to have alliances with cruelly oppressive
regimes because they happened to be non-communist,
although many of them were worst than the
communists. The problem we face internationally is
that given our treatment of detainees in Guantamano,
our suspension of civil rights including in our own
country, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the rest of the
world doesn't see us having as much credibility as
we used to have regarding human rights. And that,
that is a tragedy.
Q. You're an advocate for the independence of
Kurdistan and lot of talk is going on today about
splitting Iraq up into three instead of uniting it
into one. There would be a Sunni Iraq, a Shiite Iraq
and a Kurdistan. Do you think that it's possible?
Galbraith: I'm
not in favor of splitting up Iraq. That has already
happened, it's already broken up. So I am simply an
opponent of spending lots of money and using our
troops to try to put it back together again. God
didn't create any country. They exist to serve human
purposes. The fact is that Iraq was created by the
British, held together by force, by procession of
dictators from King Faisal in 1921 to Saddam Hussein
whose reign ended in 2003. And they were all
Sunni-Arab dictators that brutally repressed the
Kurds and Shiites majority and now they're gone.
It's not surprising that the Kurds who never wanted
to be part of Iraq still want to be independent. And
my view is yes. The people want to have their own
country, in general, there should be a bias in favor
of allowing it. It isn't always possible but it's
possible in this case.
As a part of the government and during your time as
a government official, did you ever feel pressured
to say certain things and not to say certain things?
How do you feel now having moved away from that? If
you're a part of the government and you hold a
senior position, you do have an obligation to
support the policy. I had strong disagreements with
the policy we had in regards to the Bosnian war for
the first two years. Specifically, I felt we were
much too passive and I was constantly arguing for a
more active role. But I was an ambassador, I had
access to the Secretary of State and to the White
House and I made my case internally. It seemed to me
that that was what it should be. After all, they
needed to be able to rely on me to carry out their
decisions Clinton was elected, not me. In the end,
it worked out, the position I advocated ultimately
was decided on and they had confidence in me to
implement it.
Q. What should young people keep in mind
about making a difference?
Galbraith: Basic
things. First, to keep focus on the really important
issues. Issues like genocide. We live in the time
when the images of what's going on are brought into
our homes. That's something that's very new. I think
that's positive. The second is that everybody can do
something. Again, the sin is not to try and fail,
it's to do nothing at all. There are things that
people can do. And third, I suppose people need to
think about careers. So, one way to change
government is to go into government.
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