FORMER AMB. GALBRAITH TO SPEAK  ON
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF  THE IRAQ WAR

For the sixth year Ambassador Peter Galbraith returns to give his annual lecture for The Windham World Affairs Council of Vermont. Dr. Galbraith will speak on his newest book, “Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies ,”on Friday October 10, 7:30 PM, on the World Learning/SIT campus, International Center in Brattleboro, Vermont. Directions http://www.sit.edu/graduate/2476.htm.

 Former Ambassador to the United Nations,  Richard Holbrooke says about Unintended Consequences, "In this angry and passionate book, Peter Galbraith lays out the disastrous consequences of the Bush years. The next president will inherit the mess; let's hope he absorbs the lessons of Galbraith's work, and acts on them."

As Galbraith states in his book, the  Iraq war was intended to make the United States more secure, bring democracy to the Middle East, intimidate Iran and Syria, help win the war on terror, consolidate American world leadership, and entrench the Republican Party for decades.

Instead, Bush handed Iran its greatest strategic triumph in four centuries; U.S. troops now fight to support an Iraqi government led by religious parties intent on creating an Iranian-style Islamic republic; as part of the surge, the United States created a Sunni militia led by the same Baathists the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow;  obsessed with Iraq's nonexistent WMD, the Bush administration gave Iran and North Korea a free pass to advance their nuclear programs; Turkey, a key NATO ally long considered a model pro-Western Muslim democracy, became one of the most anti-American countries in the world; U.S. prestige around the world reached an all-time low.

Peter Galbraith has been a consultant for corporations in the areas of strategic communications and marketing strategy. He has been in Iraq many times over the last twenty-one years during historic turning points for the country: the Iran-Iraq War, the Kurdish genocide, the 1991 uprising, the immediate aftermath of the 2003 war, and the writing of Iraq's constitutions. He draws on his nearly two decades of involvement in Iraq policy working for the U.S. government to assess what has occurred and what will happen. He is author of The End of Iraq (2006) which is the definitive account of this war and its ramifications, and  last year, After Iraq: Cleaning Up After America’s Biggest Foreign Policy Mistake.

 Dr. Galbraith has served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia where he mediated the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. He is currently Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and principal in a Vermont-based firm specializing in international negotiations. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

 The Windham World Affairs Council of Vermont  is part of the “World Affairs Councils of America” (WACA), the largest international affairs non-profit organization with 484,000 members and participants. WWAC is a non-partisan, all-volunteer council and proudly offers all events free of charge to the public. To join the Windham World Affairs Council of Vermont and receive regular mailings of events, please send an email to info@windhamworldaffairs.org.