Speaker biographies

David Bellavia is a cofounder of Vets for Freedom. He is the author of the much-acclaimed war memoir House to House: An Epic Memoir of War (Simon & Schuster, 2007), about door-to-door close combat in Iraq, and a former army staff sergeant who served in the 1st Infantry Division (Task Force 2-2) for six years. Sergeant Bellavia is the recipient of both the Silver Star and the Bronze Star Medal for valor and the Conspicuous Service Cross, New York State’s highest award for combat valor. He has also been nominated for both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor for his actions in a fierce urban hand-to-hand fight in the battle of Fallujah in November 2004. As a result of their involvement in this operation, Sergeant Bellavia and members of his unit became the subjects of the Time magazine cover story "Into the Hot Zone" and were awarded the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation. Sergeant Bellavia returned to Iraq in June 2006 as an embedded reporter with the Iraqi Army. His reports appeared in The Weekly Standard. A frequent military analyst on both FOX News and CNN, Sergeant Bellavia was invited to attend the president’s State of the Union address as an honored guest in 2006. He has been inducted into the New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame, and he founded a local veterans coordination center in New York State that focuses on the early treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other veteran-related issues and outreach programs.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, terrorism, and the war in Iraq. His current research focuses on U.S. compliance with the law of war in Iraq. Mr. Kahl has published articles on U.S. policy and military conduct in Iraq in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and International Security and is completing a book entitled The Culture of Calamity: Norms, the U.S. Military, and the War in Iraq. His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, focusing particular attention on the demographic and natural resource dimensions of these conflicts. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and related articles and chapters have appeared in International Security, the Journal of International Affairs, and various edited volumes. Mr. Kahl is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a regular consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense on stability operations, counterinsurgency, and strategy, and he has been a consultant for the U.S. government’s Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. From January 2005 to August 2006, he was a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states and conducted research on U.S. operations in Iraq. From 1997 to 1998, Mr. Kahl was a national security fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

Eric Swabb served in Iraq as a Marine infantry officer from September 2004 to March 2005 and is a current member of Vets for Freedom. He led a platoon in Alpha Company, 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, and participated in combat operations in the Fallujah area, including Operation Al Fajr. After the battle for Fallujah in November 2004, he was in charge of a U.S.-Iraqi combat outpost in a town near the city. Swabb planned and executed counterinsurgency operations in partnership with the Iraqi Army that engaged local tribes and dismantled three insurgent cells. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal for Valor and Combat Action Ribbon for his service in Iraq. After ending active duty in 2006, Swabb enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he is now a third-year J.D. candidate. Since returning from Iraq, he has published articles and op-eds on the war in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Baltimore Sun, and Marine Corps Gazette. He has also made television and radio appearances regarding the Iraq War on BBC World News, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, New England Cable News, and local radio stations. Swabb holds a B.A. in political science from Columbia University.

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 Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan (AEI, 2008).

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