Ali Alfoneh is a researcher in residence at AEI and a doctoral candidate in the department of political science at the University of Copenhagen. His research areas include civil-military relations in the Middle East in general, with a special focus on Iran and the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the politics of the Islamic Republic. Previously, Mr. Alfoneh was a research fellow at the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College and taught political economy at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.

Jon Alterman is the director of the Middle East program and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and George Washington University. Prior to joining CSIS, he served as a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State and as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. He served as an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group (also known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission). Before entering government, he was a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. From 1993 to 1997, Mr. Alterman was an award-winning teacher at Harvard University. He also worked as a legislative aide to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY), responsible for foreign policy and defense. He is the author or coauthor of four books on the Middle East. In addition to his academic work, he is a frequent commentator in print, on radio, and on television. His op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Asharq al-Awsat, and other major publications.

Patrick Clawson is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books and monographs, including The Last Resort: Consequences of Preventive Military Action Against Iran (The Washington Institute, 2008). Previously, he served for five years as a senior research professor at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and four years each as a senior economist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Clawson has published op-eds in major newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. In addition to his frequent appearances on television and radio, he has authored more than seventy articles on the Middle East in such journals as Foreign Affairs, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, The Middle East Journal, and Les Cahiers de l’Orient. Mr. Clawson has also testified before congressional committees more than twenty times and has been an expert witness in more than a dozen federal cases.

Michael Connell is a member of the research staff and the director of the Iran project at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). While at CNA, Mr. Connell has directed or authored several studies that focus on political, military, and security issues related to Iran and the other Arabian Gulf countries. His most recent work focuses on Iran’s ballistic missile program and the Revolutionary Guard Corps ascendancy in Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Mr. Connell also served as CNA’s field representative to the headquarters of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain. Prior to joining CNA, Mr. Connell served as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

Jeffrey Gedmin is the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Prague. Previously, he served for six years as the president of the Aspen Institute in Berlin. From 1996 to 2001, he led the AEI-sponsored New Atlantic Initiative, formerly a coalition of international institutes, politicians, journalists, and business executives whose goal was to revitalize and expand the Atlantic community of democracies. His articles on U.S. foreign policy and American public diplomacy have appeared in numerous newspapers, including the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Kenneth Katzman is a specialist in Middle East affairs for the Congressional Research Service, where he provides analysis to members of Congress and their staffs on Persian Gulf political, military, and diplomatic affairs and on U.S. policy in that region. Mr. Katzman has served in government and the private sector as an analyst in Persian Gulf affairs, with special emphasis on Iran and Iraq, the Persian Gulf states, Afghanistan, and terrorist groups operating in the Middle East and South Asia. He also has written numerous articles in various outside publications. He is the author of The Warriors of Islam: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (Westview Press, 1993), and has given many official presentations and briefings at conferences and in bilateral meetings throughout the Islamic world. In 1996 and from July 2001 until March 2002, he was assigned to the majority staff of the House International Relations Committee to work on Middle East issues, including hearings and legislation. In 1998 he wrote expert working papers on the ballistic missile capabilities of Iran and Iraq for the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (also known as the Rumsfeld Commission). In late 1999 the Atlantic Council published his study entitled U.S.-Iran Relations: An Analytic Compendium of U.S. Policies, Laws, and Regulations.

John Limbert is a distinguished professor of international affairs at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he has served since his 2006 retirement from the Foreign Service. From 2000 until 2003 he served as the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. Previously, he served as the deputy coordinator for counterterrorism in the U.S. Department of State (2000); the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Conakry, Guinea (1994–97); and the director of orientation at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (1992–94). Before joining the Foreign Service, he taught in Iran, both as a Peace Corps volunteer (1964–66) and as a professor at Shiraz University (1969¬–72). He has written numerous articles on Middle Eastern subjects and has authored Iran: At War with History (Westview Press, 1987) and Shiraz in the Age of Hafez (University of Washington Press, 2004). Ambassador Limbert worked at the U.S. Embassy in Iran when it was overrun by students and he spent nine months in solitary confinement during the Iran hostage crisis.

Michael Makovsky has been the foreign policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPS) since 2006. He is a foreign policy expert, focusing on the intersection of international energy markets and politics with U.S. national security. From 2002 to2006, he served as a special assistant for Iraqi energy policy in the Office of Secretary of Defense and the director of essential services in the Washington office of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Previously, Mr. Makovsky worked for over a decade as a senior energy market analyst for various energy trading companies and exchanges. He is author of Churchill’s Promised Land (Yale University Press, 2007), a diplomatic history about Winston Churchill.

Michael J. Metrinko is a ministry reform adviser at the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A retired foreign service officer with extensive experience in the Islamic world, his State Department assignments took him to Turkey and Iran, as well as Poland, Syria, Yemen, and Israel. His assignments in Washington included two years as the deputy director of the Iran-Iraq desk and three years as an office director in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, where he had oversight responsibility for refugee programs in Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. He returned to active government service after the events of 9/11, with assignments in Yemen, Iraq, and for four years in Afghanistan at U.S. and NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. His last posting was as an adviser on parliamentary affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, where he spent almost two years dealing directly with the new National Assembly of Afghanistan.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism, and weapons proliferation. Before coming to AEI, Ms. Pletka served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Since joining AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, directed a project on democracy in the Arab world, and designed a project to track global business in Iran. She was a member of the congressionally mandated U.S. Institute of Peace Task Force on the United Nations, which released its final report in 2005. She recently coedited Dissent and Reform in the Arab World: Empowering Democrats (AEI Press, 2008) and coauthored the 2008 AEI report Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI, a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Civil-Military Relations, and the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Rubin previously served as an Iran and Iraq country director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as a political adviser in the Coalition Provisional Authority. He is the author of two books about Iranian history and politics, most recently Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and he publishes articles in a range of scholarly and policy journals. Mr. Rubin lectures frequently on the politics, culture, and strategy of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and South Asian countries to senior military officers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a regular contributor to major U.S. and Middle Eastern newspapers.

Mohsen Sazegara is the head of the Contemporary Iran Research Institute. In 1979, as a member of the Iran Liberation Movement he returned with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran to found the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and become managing director of the National Radio of Iran. Mr. Sazegara held many state positions during the 1980s, including political deputy in the prime minister's office and chairman of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization of Iran. In 1989, he left the Revolutionary government and became publisher of several reformist newspapers. In 2001, his candidacy for president was rejected by the Guardian Council, and he was imprisoned in 2003. Currently, Mr. Sazegara analyzes political and social affairs in Iran.

Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar at AEI, where he is the director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies. Prior to coming to AEI, he helped found and served as the executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington-based foreign and defense policy think tank. Previously, Mr. Schmitt was a member of the professional staff of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and served as the committee’s minority staff director. In 1984, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the post of executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board at the White House. Mr. Schmitt is the coeditor, with Thomas Donnelly, of Of Men and Materiel: The Crisis in Military Resources (AEI Press, 2007). Mr. Schmitt has written books and articles on a number of topics, including the founding of America, the U.S. presidency, intelligence, and national security affairs.

Arash Sigarchi is an acclaimed Iranian journalist and the founder of the weblog Panjereh Eltehab (Window of Anguish). He began his career in journalism at age sixteen. He was the editor of the daily Gilan Emrooz from 2000 to 2008. Last year, Mr. Sigarchi migrated to the United States after spending fourteen months in prison in Iran for his publications criticizing the government.

Alex Vatanka is the senior U.S.-based Middle East analyst at Jane’s Information Group. He joined Jane’s in London in April 2001 and since March 2006 has been the managing editor of Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst and Jane’s Intelligence Digest. His most recent publications include the papers “Republic enemy: US policy and Iranian election” (Jane’s Intelligence Review, November 2008) and “Iran’s Shia Reach Out to Mainstream Salafists” (CTC Sentinel/West Point, June 2008). Mr. Vatanka joined the Middle East Institute as an Adjunct Scholar in July 2007 and since 2006 has been a fellow in Middle East studies at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School.