Oligarchs-R-US

By Steve Hynd

Peter Galbraith, who was recently in the news in a good way for slamming UN complicity in Afghan election corruption, is back in the news in a bad way. Galbraith, who was a signator of the PNAC letter calling for the invasion of Iraq and a major influence on the Iraqi constitution - which gave so much autonomy to the Kurds - had his fingers in the till.

Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region � rather than the central Baghdad government � sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

...Interviews by The New York Times with more than a dozen current and former government and business officials in Norway, France, Iraq, the United States and elsewhere, along with legal records and other documents, reveal in considerable detail that he received rights to an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan�s oil fields in the spring of 2004.

As it turns out, Mr. Galbraith received the rights after he helped negotiate a potentially lucrative contract that allowed the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in the promising Dohuk region of Kurdistan, the interviews and documents show.

Glenn Greenwald is spot on when he describes this as "par for the course" in Washington.

Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people -- on the crazed "Arab street" and in American-hating leftist circles -- actually believed in "conspriacy" theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?  

Here we have yet another example of one of America's most Serious and respected "experts" advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.  He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so -- the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox -- all while those interests remained concealed.  His uniting with the country's most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration's attack on Iraq didn't prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.'s number two official in Afghanistan.  He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert.  In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America's Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function.

Glenn's right that this is just how the oligarchy rolls. Time and again we've seen well-connected D.C. insiders caught up in what is a particularly nasty form of insider trading, using their connections to profit from war and bloodshed. We've had Cheney and Halliburton, Feinstein and her husband's defense companies, "Duke" Cunningham's bribe-taking and so many, many more. Milt Bearden, who was given plaudits by John Kerry when he appeared before the Senator's committee, is just another of the latest. It's just the most odious part of what David Sirota has called the "invisible culture of corruption".

I'll mention again Jonathan Landay's claim back in March that U.S. officials are complicit in Afghan corruption - and repeat what I wrote back then. Which officials, how wide and how high? Uniformed as well as civilian? Are there any names that were in the same position to make corrupt profits in Iraq?

No-one in the D.C. village seems all that interested in a comprehensive attempt to find out. I wonder why...