Speaker biographies

Jon Alterman is director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Middle East program. Previously, 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. Mr. Alterman served as an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group and is a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the George Washington University. Before entering government, he was a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI. An expert in Middle East affairs, he has focused on Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as on terrorism and intelligence. He is the author of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) and The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (AEI Press, 2004). He is a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard and a correspondent for The Atlantic, as well as a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications. Mr. Gerecht formerly held positions as the director of the Middle East Initiative for the Project for the New American Century and as a Middle Eastern specialist in the Central Intelligence Agency.

Martin Indyk is director of the Saban Center for Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Clinton administration assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. He has also worked as a research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and served as executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

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).

Vance Serchuk is foreign policy adviser to Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-D-Conn.). He previously worked as a research fellow at AEI between 2004 and 2005, where he studied the intersection of national security and economic development. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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