May 14, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Bathsheba Crocker is co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). From 2002–2003, she was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, working on post-conflict reconstruction issues. In July 2003, she was a member of a CSIS-led Iraqi reconstruction assessment team. Before joining CSIS, Ms. Crocker worked as an attorney-adviser in the Legal Adviser's Office at the U.S. Department of State and as the deputy U.S. special representative for the Southeast Europe Initiative, working on economic reconstruction in the Balkans. She also served as the executive assistant to the deputy national security adviser at the White House.

Hassan Mneimneh is executive director of the Iraq Foundation and director of documentation projects for the Iraq Memory Foundation, a Baghdad-based project which seeks to catalog and document the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He was previously co-director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University. He is a regular contributor to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat. His publications include "Manual for a ‘Raid’" (co-authored with Kanan Makiya in the New York Review of Books).

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East (including Iran, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. While at AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, a project on democracy for the Arab world, a roundtable of experts to discuss global energy security, and a project to develop bilateral relations between India and the United States. Before coming to AEI, she served for 10 years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Ms. Pletka has also been a staff writer for Insight Magazine, as well as an editorial assistant for the Los Angeles Times and Reuters in Jerusalem.

Entifadh K. Qanbar is the spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in Baghdad. He was the director of the INC's Washington office until the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. Mr. Qanbar also served as the liaison between the Pentagon and the INC. After serving for five years in the Iraqi Air Force during the Iraqi-Iranian War, he was arrested in 1987 for suspected activities against Saddam’s regime. From 1999 to 2000, he served as vice president for the Iraq Liberation Action Committee, a political action committee that promotes the implementation of the U.S. Iraq Liberation act of 1998. He has a master's degree in environmental engineering from Georgia Tech.

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