The Khalilzad-DNO Affair and the Galbraith Parallels

The Khalilzad-DNO Affair and the Galbraith Parallels
Posted by Reidar Visser on Thursday, 24 June 2010 15:14

The recent nomination of the former US ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to a position on the board of DNO, a Norwegian private company engaged in oil deals in Kurdistan, has already generated big headlines. Part of the reason is that following Peter Galbraith, Khalilzad is the second key US figure involved in constitutional issues during the years 2003–2005 to acquire business interests in Kurdistan.

Continued disagreement between the Kurds and Baghdad over supremacy and governance issues in the oil sector makes this kind of dual involvement into a particularly touchy area.

Certain parallels to Peter Galbraith do exist in this case, but the differences also remain considerable. In the first place, the timing of Khalilzad’s involvement with DNO seems somewhat tidier. Khalilzad quit his diplomatic mission in Iraq in 2007 and his involvement with DNO started after that date (and only became formalised recently after he was nominated for the DNO board by the Emirati company RAK, which has a big stake in DNO shares).

Conversely, Peter Galbraith continued to advise the Kurds during the constitutional negotiations in August 2005 even after he had started receiving money from DNO and had also acquired his “stake” in the Tawke oil project.

Secondly, to the extent that he is known to have had any direct impact on legal frameworks directly relating to the oil sector, Khalilzad was unsuccessful. Khalilzad failed in his offensive to getting a package of oil legislation passed in early 2007; Galbraith, by way of contrast, was successful in obtaining constitutional accept for many of the principles he authored in late 2003 and early 2004 about regional influence in the oil sector (or at least a sufficient degree of legal ambiguity to create problems for Baghdad).

In fact, the parts of the Iraqi constitution with which Khalilzad is most clearly associated are the last-minute amendments that were designed to encourage participation in Sunni Muslim areas in the 15 October 2005 constitutional referendum, including, importantly, the key point about a one-off batch of constitutional revisions with no supermajorities required in parliament (which of course could ultimately reverse everything the Kurds have been dreaming of with respect to regional influence in the oil sector and, in a worst-case scenario for DNO, the business prospects with which Khalilzad has now become associated).

The closest parallel to Galbraith is probably the fact that both he and Khalilzad appear happy to continue to advise US public opinion about the best US policy also after their involvement in Kurdish oil. Galbraith’s penmanship in support of some kind of decentralised solution for Iraq has already generated two books (The End of Iraq and Unintended Consequences), whereas Khalilzad just months ago wrote an op-ed in The Financial Times in which he advocated US support for a coalition government consisting of Iraqiyya, State of Law and the Kurdistan list, with Nuri al-Maliki and Ayad Allawi taking turns as premier. This is of course an interesting position, given that in theory, Maliki and Allawi alone actually have a sufficient number of deputies to form a government without the Kurds but that they nevertheless persist in attempts at negotiating with Arbil instead of with each other.

This position by Khalilzad on the issue of government formation is also one which is apparently being viewed with interest by the Obama administration. In a recent interview with BBC Hard Talk, Ambassador Chris Hill was asked whether the next government would include the Sadrists (apparently, this scenario is favoured by BBC reporters as the epitome of tragedy in Iraq). Hill replied by saying something to the effect that this was not necessarily the case. “There are four parties”, he began, apparently thinking of the old four-way formula once favoured by the Bush administration of Daawa-ISCI-Kurds-Sunnis, with Iraqiyya apparently serving as “Sunnis” instead of Tawafuq this time.

But then he started with the details, first mentioning just State of Law and Iraqiyya, and pausing to emphasise that those parties alone held “almost” enough seats to form a government (they actually have more than enough, but it is good news that this scenario is now at least being considered in Washington). He then mentioned the Kurds briefly (as per the Khalilzad proposal) and moved on to other issues before ISCI (or the Sadrist-free rump INA) was even mentioned.

In his commentary on Iraqi affairs, Khalilzad has made it clear that he has a far better understanding of what is going on in Iraq south of Kurdistan than Galbraith, who was always on thin ice whenever he ventured to comment on Baghdad politics. But with his recent involvement as a nominee for the DNO board, Khalilzad no longer enjoys any neutrality on the Iraqi scene: He is effectively a proponent of the vision of a strongly decentralised Iraq that is favoured by those who envisage an autonomous Kurdish oil sector.

Any future policy advice on his part about any aspect of US Iraq policy – like the advisability of this or that coalition combination – will be tainted, like that of Galbraith, by business interests that dictate a preference for a weak Baghdad and an oil minister favouring regional interests over national ones.
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Karzai lashes out at West over Afghan elections

Karzai lashes out at West over Afghan elections
01 Apr 2010 19:15:27 GMT
Source: Reuters
* U.S. rejects Karzai accusations
* Denounces U.S., French officials involved in 2009 poll
* Says West wants weak Afghan president, parliament (Adds United Nations reaction, U.S. comment)

By Golnar Motevalli
KABUL, April 1 (Reuters) - President Hamid Karzai accused the West on Thursday of trying to ruin Afghanistan's elections, intensifying a showdown with parliament over whether foreigners will oversee a parliamentary vote this year.

Karzai's international reputation took a beating after a U.N.-backed fraud watchdog threw out a third of the votes cast for him in last year's presidential election. He is now wrangling with parliament and the United Nations over fraud protection measures for a parliamentary vote due in September.

"Foreigners will make excuses, they do not want us to have a parliamentary election," a defiant Karzai told a gathering of election officials. "They want parliament to be weakened and battered, and for me to be an ineffective president and for parliament to be ineffective.

"You have gone through the kind of elections during which you were not only threatened with terror, you also faced massive interference from foreigners," Karzai told the officials. "Some embassies also tried to bribe the members of the commission."

In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley rejected Karzai's accusations the West wanted to see the Afghan parliament weakened and for him to be ineffective.

"We do not accept that judgment," Crowley said.

What was important, said Crowley, was that Karzai be seen by his own people as governing effectively and that he take "measurable" steps against corruption. "Karzai has to step forward," Crowley told reporters.

Karzai singled out Peter Galbraith, the American former deputy of the U.N. mission in Kabul, sacked after accusing his boss of turning a blind eye to fraud, and French General Philippe Morillon, head of an EU vote monitoring mission.

"There was fraud in the presidential and provincial election, with no doubt there was massive fraud. This wasn't fraud by Afghans but the fraud of foreigners, the fraud of Galbraith, of Morillon and the votes of the Afghan nation were in the control of an embassy," Karzai said.

He accused Galbraith of telling an election official he would be "digging himself an early grave" if Karzai was declared first round winner and said Morillon had tried to block the announcement of results to force Karzai to accept a political alliance.

Galbraith could not be reached for comment.

ELECTION STAND-OFF
Last year's election stand-off -- which ended when the U.N.-backed body ordered a second round but Karzai's opponent quit -- eroded support in the West for the eight-year-old war.

A new election confrontation could further sour public opinion in a decisive year, when Washington is sending an extra 30,000 troops.
Ahead of September's parliamentary poll, Karzai issued a decree in February revoking the power of the United Nations to appoint the majority of members of the election fraud watchdog.

The lower house of parliament rejected Karzai's decree on Wednesday, a move diplomats described as a rebuke for the president, although the motion would still need to pass in the upper house to restore U.N. oversight of the vote.

Karzai told the election officials and reporters his decree was vital to Afghanistan's sovereignty.

The United Nations has called for reforms to Afghanistan's election commission to prevent fraud before it will agree to free up donor funds needed to pay for the Sept. 18 vote.

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said the world body would not comment on Karzai's accusations. "We have made clear the efforts by the United Nations to determine and to deal with allegations of fraud and we stand by that," Haq told journalists on Thursday at U.N. headquarters in New York.

"The foreigners have said if you don't dismiss these men, we will not give you any money," Karzai said, adding he would announce changes to the election commission next week.

The fraud watchdog is a separate body, which was led by a Canadian during last year's election and ordered the election commission to overturn Karzai's first round victory.

New U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura accepted a compromise offer from Karzai this month that would let the United Nations appoint a minority of members of the fraud watchdog, rather than the majority as it did last year. Parliament's rejection of Karzai's decree means the status of that deal is now in doubt.
"I am working on it. That's all I can say," de Mistura told Reuters late on Wednesday. (Additional reporting by Basil Katz at the United Nations and Sue Pleming in Washington; Editing by Peter Graff and Ron Popeski)

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N01160403.htm

Once More, Peter Galbraith Fails to Clear His Name

Once More, Peter Galbraith Fails to Clear His Name
Posted by Reidar Visser on January 14, 2010
http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/once-more-peter-galbraith-fails-to-clear-his-name/

The Iraqi parliament has already gone on holiday until next Tuesday so we might as well take a look at the most recent attempt by Peter Galbraith to explain to the world exactly what he was up to with his multiple roles in Kurdistan in the period 2004–2006. Whereas his latest contribution does not really contain any significant new information, it has been circulated by the author and his friends with such fervour that a refutation should be available for the record.


Galbraith’s latest version of events appears in the 14 January issue of The New York Review of Books under the headline “A Statement on My Activities in Kurdistan” – and as such cannot fail to generate expectations of a “full and final disclosure”. In that perspective, however, the piece is a rather disappointing affair. With the exception of two minor details there is no new information, just a rehash of the same old story, and the article certainly fails to effectively rebut the key point of criticism against Galbraith: That he continued to stay involved in the Iraqi constitutional process also after he acquired a business interest in the Norwegian oil company DNO and its Kurdistan operations in 2004. The only new pieces that are added to the puzzle are the fact that the Iraqi oil ministry must have known about Galbraith’s interest in DNO (since Galbraith represented the company on a joint committee), and also that the government of the United States was somehow informed.


Today, Galbraith wants us to read his “Kurdistan activities” between 2004 and 2006 roughly as follows. After having been interested in the Kurdish cause during the 1990s (partly on basis of his experience with Kurdish refugees after the 1991 uprising) he in 2004 “helped Kurdistan’s leaders draft a proposal for a self-governing Kurdistan that was submitted to the Coalition Provisional Authority on February 11, 2004, for inclusion in Iraq’s interim constitution”. Since the proposal also included provisions for regional control of the oil sector, Galbraith’s next step was to help the Kurds start building their oil sector in practice on the ground. Accordingly, he “helped bring DNO, a Norwegian oil company, into Kurdistan”.

As part of this process, he was “paid by DNO and entered into a financial arrangement with the company through a Delaware partnership, Porcupine LP.” Later, in 2005, he “advised” the Kurds on their negotiations for a permanent constitution; however Galbraith stresses that their negotiating position was more or less similar to the one “they” had defined in February 2004, “and they achieved virtually all of it”. Galbraith specifically denies having “pushed through” anything during the negotiations, thereby refuting a claim made by The New York Times concerning his overall level of influence on the Iraqi constitutional process.


Galbraith’s account is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. Firstly, no matter how much he tries to dress things up by referring to the “Kurdish proposal of February 2004” there is no way he can erase what he himself wrote on this subject back in 2006, when he in considerable detail bragged about how almost every single word of that proposal had in fact been written by himself.

On p. 167 of The End of Iraq, Galbraith highlighted this fact by dramatically describing the sole change to his own proposal that was introduced by the Kurds: “Kosrat Rasul, the veteran PUK peshmerga who had served as Kurdistan’s second prime minister in 1994, wanted to clarify that deployments of the Iraqi Kurdistan national guard outside the region should not only be approved by the Kurdistan national assembly but should only occur at the request of the federal government in Baghdad.

His amendment underscored the Kurds’ reluctance to be involved in Iraq’s wars. With that change, the proposal was accepted.” Galbraith’s five-page proposal, that is, with the single-paragraph amendment by Rasul! In other words, every time Galbraith refers to “the Kurdish proposal of February 2004”, please substitute “the Galbraith proposal of February 2004”. This applies for example when Galbraith writes, “The Kurds…had set the agenda and they pushed through their own proposal”. It was largely Galbraith’s proposal they pushed through.

Secondly, with respect to the supposedly “informal” nature of Galbraith’s involvement with the constitution after he had acquired an “interest” in DNO in June 2004 (at which point the conflict of interests obviously got more pronounced), at least three smoking guns can be found just in the open sources. The first two are again of Galbraith’s own making, and once more can be found in The End of Iraq. On p. 199 in a footnote Galbraith cannot resist revealing how he personally intervened to dissuade a British official from opening a debate about the taxation power of the central government close to the deadline for the constitutional draft. Also, on p. 171 he depicts his own role in staging a semi-official referendum on Kurdish independence on the sidelines of the January 2005 elections.

The third significant reference is from his friend, Jonathan Morrow, who on p. 13 of a report entitled Iraq’s Constitutional Process II from 2005 describes how the “Kurdish parties were able to invite into the ad hoc meetings [where Kurdish and Shiite leaders designed the shape of the new constitution] experienced non-Iraqi international negotiators and constitutional lawyers, including former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith and University of Maryland Professor Karol Soltan, to advance the Kurdish case.” Again, what was he doing there, if he had a business interest in DNO? This truly is a “private citizen” extraordinaire, with access to all areas, and clearly so active that even open-source materials attest to his influential role.

One additional aspect that strangely has yet to receive much attention in the American debate is the question of possible disinformation of the US Congress by Galbraith in ways that could advance his own “business interests”. On 11 January 2006, Galbraith, who by that time was still involved with DNO, suggested several policy measures in a testimony to the US Senate called “Acknowledge Partition and Withdraw: A Reality Based Strategy for Iraq”. Among these measures was the idea of a general US withdrawal from Iraq, with the exception of a “small over the horizon force in Kurdistan”, explained with reference to the claim that “the Kurds are among the most pro-American people in the world and would welcome a US military presence, not the least because it would help protect them from Arab Iraqis who resent their close cooperation with the US during the 2003 War and thereafter.” Coincidentally, of course, that small American military force would also protect Galbraith’s “business interests” and the Tawke oilfield to which these interests relate. But Galbraith did not tell Congress that, did he?

Additionally, many of the conjectures by Galbraith in his congressional testimony are inaccurate or misleading. For example, the idea that other Iraqis would embark on some kind of systematic revenge operation to physically attack the Kurds for their cooperation with the Americans since 2003 seems a little exaggerated. (By 2006, vast number of non-Kurdish Iraqis had done exactly the same thing in terms of cooperation.) Galbraith also vastly overplays Shiite interest in federalism when he asserts that “Iraq’s Council of Representatives has already passed a law paving the way to the formation of a Shiite ‘super-region’ in fifteen months” and later goes on to talk about “a Shiite Region likely on its way”. In fact, three years later, few Iraqi Shiites seem to have any interest in a Shiite region whatsoever (even Ammar al-Hakim has left the specific idea of a nine-governorate “Shiite” region and now talks about federal regions more generally). Also, Galbraith failed to mention that the law to which he referred in fact enables several thousand other, non-sectarian scenarios of Iraqi governorates combining into federal regions (yes, that’s right, thousands, new regions can be everything from a single governorate to 14 governorates coming together and need not be territorially contiguous, so the reservoir of possible combinations of those existing governorates that are allowed to form multi-governorate regions, i.e. excepting Baghdad, is truly mind-boggling).

Towards the end of his attempt at rebuttal, Galbraith does a wonderful job of highlighting the general shakiness of his own position. He writes, “A separate issue arises over what I should have disclosed in connection with my articles in The New York Review of Books… I wrote several other articles in 2004 and 2005, some of which briefly discussed the oil issue, and did not mention my business arrangements. These arrangements were covered by confidentiality agreements, but I should have stated that I had business interests in Kurdistan. I regret not having done so and apologize to the editors and readers of The New York Review of Books. In my later articles, I did state that I was ‘a principal at the Windham Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in post-conflict societies, including in Iraq.’ ”


The big issue, of course, is that he did not mention Porcupine and DNO! But to Galbraith that distinction between a consultancy firm and an oil company appears to be unimportant, and he offers the reference to the Windham Resources Group in the hope that this may mollify NYRB readers after his failure to disclose inconvenient truths about Norwegian oil companies and multi-million stakes in the Kurdistan oil industry. As with so many other aspects of his “activities in Kurdistan”, Galbraith is either unable or unwilling to see the bigger picture and the strong linkages between his private-citizen “business interests” on the one hand and the Iraqi constitutional process and US policy debate on the other.

A Weak Attempt at Rebuttal: Galbraith (2009) Is Contradicted by Galbraith (2006)

http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/

Posted by Reidar Visser on November 16, 2009

The NYT has previously been generous in offering space to Peter Galbraith and may have felt it had some explaining to do to its readers. The above example is from 9 July 2006.

“Innuendo.” “Absurd.” “Offensive.” Those are the words employed by Peter Galbraith over the weekend in an attempt to dismiss the charge that he had an impact on the shape of Kurdish demands in Iraq’s constitutional negotiations back in 2005. After a front-page, above-the-fold story in the New York Times last week, the Tawke-gate saga has for the first time attracted the attention of US mainstream media in a big way and Galbraith is gradually becoming more talkative.

Galbraith now maintains that his role for the Kurds back in 2004 and 2005 was that of a mere facilitator who had no impact on the formulation of Kurdish goals and ambitions as such – which in his view means that it was also unproblematic for him to simultaneously have a consultancy contract with the Norwegian oil company DNO, which began operating in the Kurdish areas of Iraq at the time. He has added that the fact that his “business arrangements” were known to the Kurdish leadership meant it was unproblematic for him to sit in on key meetings related to the constitutional process in the summer of 2005. Galbraith stresses that he “did no drafting”.

The fundamental problem for Peter Galbraith is that there exists a detailed published account that tells a very different story. Moreover, this source is authored by someone who was extremely close to those events back in 2004 and 2005 and probably knew a lot about what was going on – Peter Galbraith himself. In his book The End of Iraq, published in 2006, Galbraith recounts in considerable detail how he not only made an impact through shaping Kurdish demands, but also how almost all of his suggestions were verbatim inserted in the Kurdish negotiating proposal of February 2004 that later was to have such a great impact on the Iraqi constitution that was eventually adopted in 2005.

On p. 160 of his book, Galbraith describes his own arrival on the scene in 2003 as follows: “While they had secured support from the Iraqi opposition for federalism, the Kurds had yet to think through some practical issues. What powers would belong to Kurdistan and what to the central government in Baghdad…Who would control the police and security forces? And there was the all-important issue, who would own the oil of Kurdistan?”

Galbraith then goes on to bemoan the “conceptual problems” of the Kurdish leaders before he describes the liberating effect of memos written by himself from the summer of 2003 onwards. His choice of verbs tells the whole story: “I urged”… “Kurdistan should”… “I argued”.

Among his demands was the following: “Kurdistan should, I argued, own and manage its own oil resources”. Summing up his contribution, Galbraith remarks on p. 161: “These ideas [referring to his own proposals] eventually became the basis of Kurdistan’s proposal for an Iraqi constitution”. The reader clearly gets the impression that Galbraith’s role was a decisive and even a transformative one – an interpretation that makes sense also on the basis of a comparison with the previous and much less radical constitutional proposal by the Kurdish leadership from 2003 (where in article 59.4 Baghdad was given control of “all kinds of armed forces”, and in article 59.11 the oil sector was similarly described as the prerogative of the central government).

Later, on pp. 166–67 of his book from 2006, Galbraith describes how his own more detailed proposal in early 2004 was more or less copied wholesale by the Kurds to form their negotiating position as defined in February 2004. He summarises his paper Special Provisions for the Kurdistan Region of Iraq which is also reproduced in toto in an appendix to the book on pp. 225–29.

These proposals – which included the key distinction between existing and future oil fields that would later enable stronger regional influence over new oilfields in the 2005 constitution and which forms the basis for the current dispute between Baghdad and the Kurds over oil – was “accepted” by the Kurdish leadership, and then forwarded to the CPA, “as a submission by the Kurdistan National Assembly”!

According to Galbraith, his own proposals became the Kurdish proposal in all its details save for one extremely minor “amendment”: “Kosrat Rasul…wanted to clarify that deployment of the Iraqi Kurdistan National Guard should not only be approved by the Kurdistan National Assembly, but should only occur a the request of the federal government in Baghdad”. All the rest had been penned by Galbraith.

As to the influence of this “proposal” on the constitution of 2005, Galbraith is once more an excellent source. On p. 168 of The End of Iraq, he explains, “Masud Barzani took the initiative to organise a Kurdish delegation and negotiating position that would achieve each objective outlined in their February 11 proposal [which Galbraith had formulated in its entirety] and then some.” Galbraith’s book is also informative when it comes to his own role in radicalising the Kurdish position during late 2004 and 2005, especially on p. 171: “In September 2004, the Referendum Movement organisers [who campaigned for a referendum for Kurdish independence] asked me to meet with them… As we sipped Turkish coffee, we discussed how other independence movements had promoted their own causes. I recalled that at least one independence movement conducted an unofficial referendum on the same day as the country’s general election, setting up informal polling places near the official ones.

The Referendum Movement leaders thought this was an interesting precedent but doubted that the Kurdish authorities would allow it. I explained that in a democracy the authorities could not prevent such expression of free speech as long as the organisers did not interfere in the official voting”. As is well known, the referendum was indeed held along the lines suggested by Galbraith. Not bad for an “adviser”?

In a key paragraph of his book on p. 169, Galbraith summarises the way in which many elements of the “Kurdish” proposal of 11 February 2004 actually found their way into Iraq’s 2005 constitution. For example, he writes, “as the Kurds proposed in February 2004 the regional governments have exclusive control over future oil fields.”

Note, however, how different this sentence looks when we insert in brackets the information given by Galbraith himself elsewhere: “As the Kurds proposed in February 2004 [entirely on the basis of my own proposal, as described in my book The End of Iraq on pp. 166–67] the regional governments have exclusive control over future oil field [in one of which I hold a business interest through DNO, as I explained to The Boston Globe on 15 October 2009].

Because of these contradictions, Galbraith is today trying to describe exactly the same relationship using very different words: Three days, ago, on 13 November, he told The Brattleboro Reformer (a local newspaper in Vermont) that “I gave them advice and the end result that they achieved was identical to what was already proposed in February 2004 [emphasis added]”.

What Peter Galbraith does not admit in 2009 is what he boasted of in 2006, namely that 99% of the February 2004 proposal was his own work and not that of any Kurdish leader.

In retrospect, it may seem odd that Galbraith should have chosen to publish a book in 2006 that would implicate him so clearly in an unacceptable mixing of roles in business (DNO), constitutional consultancy (for the Kurds) and Iraqi policy advocacy (at home in the United States).

However, the book from 2006 was a reflection of its time. Iraq seemed to be heading downhill back then, and Galbraith was probably convinced the country would break apart (as per his suggestion). Accordingly, he was not only extremely forthcoming with information concerning his own role; he actually appeared to be glowing with the pride of a would-be Kurdish T.E. Lawrence.

What he failed to realise was that Iraq was a little more resilient than the pessimistic title of his book suggested.

In other respects, there is not much that is new in Galbraith’s latest attempts at rebutting the NYT article. He still has the audacity to suggest that the fact that he informed “Kurdish leaders” exonerated him from any possible conflict of interest!

What about the rest of the Iraqis who participated in the negotiations, did they know everything as well? And what about those in the drafting committee who did not belong to KDP/PUK and SCIRI/Daawa and were excluded from the “leadership meetings” in early August 2005, where key decisions were made, and where Galbraith himself participated repeatedly?

Iraq’s former ambassador to the UN, Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi has said it best: “You don’t let Firestone draft the constitution of Liberia. You don’t let Shell draft the constitution of Nigeria. We shouldn’t have had an oil company [i.e. Norway’s DNO] drafting the Iraqi constitution.”

Finally, in a welcome development, the editorial board of the NYT has ruled that Galbraith did indeed have a conflict of interest which should have been disclosed when he wrote op-eds in the paper in favour of the soft partition policy in Iraq.

This should make it clear once and for all that there is more to this case than the primitive Norwegian “conspiracy” alleged by some Vermont newspapers, according to which the whole affair has been fabricated by all-powerful Norwegian trolls bent on revenge for the Eide/Galbraith dispute in Afghanistan.

Galbraith Was Paid by DNO when He Sat In on Sensitive Constitutional Drafting Sessions in 2005

Posted by Reidar Visser on November 12, 2009

http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/


In many ways, today’s story in The New York Times on Tawke-gate serves to corroborate the account of events already conveyed earlier by Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv (DN). In particular, the impression that it was the Norwegian oil company DNO (rather than the KRG) that awarded a stake in the Tawke oilfield to Peter Galbraith back in 2004 is strengthened in the article, and there are interesting remarks by Abd al-Hadi al-Hassani, one of the few officials close to the Maliki administration who has had the courage to comment publicly on the affair so far. Also, it is refreshing that the NYT, which in the past has given ample space to Americans advocating a soft partition of Iraq, has chosen to publish this kind of critical perspective on one of the leading intellectuals of the soft partition crowd.

Perhaps the single most significant piece of new information in the story is the confirmation that Peter Galbraith, whose consultancy work for DNO in 2004 has previously been revealed by DN, also received payment from DNO in 2005, “throughout the constitutional negotiations in 2005 and later.” On this aspect, Iraq’s former ambassador to the UN, Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi comments to the NYT as follows: “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless”. Istrabadi emphasises that DNO in practice had “a representative in the room, drafting.”

It is often not realised how secretive and closed those final negotiations of the Iraqi constitution in August 2005 really were. A good description has been offered by Jonathan Morrow of the USIP:

“After August 8, constitutional negotiations took place in a series of private, ad hoc meetings between Kurdish and Shiite party leaders – the “Leadership Council,” as it was termed by the international press, or more informally by Committee members, “the kitchen” (matbakh). In its basic form, the Leadership Council consisted of SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Shiite Dawa party leader Prime Minister Jaafari, Kurdish PUK party leader President Jalal Talabani, and Kurdish KDP party leader Masoud Barzani. These meetings took place at irregular intervals at a number of private residences and compounds in the International Zone. These were meetings at which the Sunni Committee members had no right of attendance, to which they frequently requested attendance, but were not often invited. The expectation was quite clear: the Shiite and Kurdish parties would agree to a constitutional text, which would then be presented as a fait accompli to the Sunni Arabs, who would be asked to take it or leave it.”

Someone who was admitted to these meetings, however, was Peter Galbraith, the paid DNO consultant and stake-holder in the Tawke oilfield. Again, according to Morrow, “the Kurdish parties were able to invite into the ad hoc meetings experienced non-Iraqi international negotiators and constitutional lawyers, including former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith and University of Maryland Professor Karol Soltan, to advance the Kurdish case.”

It seems Galbraith was doing more than just “advancing the Kurdish case”: The Iraqi constitution adopted in October 2005 for the first time establishes a regional role in administering the country’s oil sector, more or less on the lines advocated by Galbraith in a policy paper from early 2004. It is noteworthy that the KDP draft constitution for Iraq from 2003, by way of contrast, accorded exclusive sovereignty to Baghdad in administering the oil sector. Today’s revelation that Galbraith also received payment from DNO, a foreign oil company, when he was sitting in on those sensitive Iraqi constitutional meetings in August 2005 where the regional role in the oil sector was established, takes the whole Tawke-gate affair to unprecedented levels of scandalousness.

New DNO Revelations: While He was Influencing the Shape of the Iraqi Constitution, Peter Galbraith Held Stakes in an Oilfield in Dahuk

By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)
10 October 2009

To read the article please click on:
http://historiae.org/galbraith.asp


A blog entry for this piece with comments options is available at http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com