Peter Galbraith had interest in Kurdish oil field while advising US government?

Michael Rubin has flagged another Norwegian story that was lost in the holiday weekend with the news of Obama's Nobel Prize: Peter W. Galbraith, Democratic Party activist and long a champion of Kurdish rights, secretly held stakes in a large Iraqi Kurdish oil field while advising U.S. policy toward the Kurds. Rubin pointed to Reidar Visser's translation of the story from Norway's main business daily Dagens Næringsliv. Today the story reaches the pages of the Boston Globe. The Globe reports: In late 2002, as the Bush administration began preparing to invade Iraq, Galbraith worked as a professor at the Naval War College and gave advice to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on how to handle problems in Kurdistan. But within months of the invasion, Galbraith left the US government and became one of its critics. In speeches, meetings with US officials, and articles in the New York Review of Books, Galbraith said Kurds should be given maximum autonomy and should have the right to develop their own oil fields, free of control by Iraq's central government. But the same time, Galbraith was quietly entering into business deals that gave him a financial stake in the positions he was advocating. Powerline blog

Posted via email from Garth's posterous