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Ambassador Peter Galbraith: Diplomacy in World Politics

By Monadnock Summe... on Friday, August 31, 2007.

Ambassador Peter Galbraith has degrees from the Commonwealth School, Harvard College, Oxford University and Georgetown University Law Center. He has served on the staff of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993, where he published many reports about Iraq and took a special interest in Kurdistan. In 1993, he was appointed the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton, later served as United Nations ambassador in East Timor and taught at the National War College (1999, 2001-2003).

Currently Ambassador Galbraith is senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006), which argues that this country's "main error" in Iraq has been "wishful thinking" and advocates acceptance of a "partition" of Iraq into three parts as part of a "new U.S. strategy based on the reality of Iraq". He has also written extensively on Iraq in the pages of the New York Review of Books.

Allen Ginsburg's "Howl"

By Liz Bulkley on Friday, August 31, 2007.

Fifty years ago this fall, a federal court judge in California ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was not obscene. We’re going to examine the celebrated poem tonight. The work became a rallying cry for the Beat Generation of the 1950’s and 60’s, and more than a million copies of it are in print today. We'll examine Ginsberg’s life and the origins of one of the most controversial poems of the 20th century.