Free Republic

More than four dozen former foreign and national security officials for the U.S. government called on Biden in a letter Friday to drop out of the presidential race. "We write as former U.S. officials who have strongly supported your presidency and your initiatives to strengthen U.S. foreign and national security policy," they wrote. "We have welcomed the measures you have taken to promote U.S. alliances in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; to manage relations with great powers; and to address global issues such as climate change. These initiatives have been built on your decades-long record of support for responsible U.S....

Yesterday the New York Times reported the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv’s revelations that Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and advisor to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Iraqi oil revenues. Galbraith’s profits would result from his cashing in on his links to the Kurdish regional leadership, and his role in drafting Iraq’s Constitution, shortly after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, Galbraith helped the Kurds arrange deals with Norwegian oil firm DNO and prepare for negotiations on the Iraqi Constitution, including controversial provisions on...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

A former UN ambassador to Afghanistan has questioned the 'mental stability' of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and suggested that he may be using drugs. Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, has made the allegations concerning Karzai in a classified UN report about life in the presidential palace in Kabul.

Postponing elections will be a terrible jolt to Iraq's long-suffering Shiites, who have seen democracy as providing them the fruits of their numerical majority. But regional elections will give the Shiites the self-government they desire without the burden of taking on an invigorated Sunni insurgency and a recalcitrant, but powerful, Kurdistan. To see what is possible in their own region, the Shiites need only look north to an increasingly prosperous Kurdistan that is today the only safe part of Iraq. For Bush, postponing national elections would be a setback; he has leaned heavily on the upcoming vote to justify his...