Details

When

November 3, 2010, 6:00 am - March 28, 2024, 6:19 am

Where

Grand Hyatt Washington
1000 H Street, NW
Washington , District of Columbia 20001 (Map)

BANQUET

Wednesday, November 3, 2010
6:00 pm to 10:00 pm

Keynote Speaker
President Bill Clinton    

William Jefferson Clinton was the first Democratic president in six decades to be elected twice – first in 1992 and then in 1996. Under his leadership, the country enjoyed the strongest economy in a generation and the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. After leaving the White House, President Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation with the mission to strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence. As a project of the Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative brings together global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues. Building on his longstanding commitment to Haiti as President and through his Foundation, President Clinton was named U.N. Special Envoy for Haiti in 2009 to assist the government and the people of Haiti as they “build back better” after a series of hurricanes battered the country in 2008.

Award Recipient
H.E. Issam M. Fares
Former Deputy Prime Minister of Lebanon

H.E. Issam M. Fares served as Lebanon's Deputy Prime Minister from 2000 to 2005 and as a Member of Parliament from 1996 to 2005. A renowned philanthropist, Mr. Fares established the Fares Foundation in the early 1970s to support public welfare, health and educational projects in Lebanon. The Foundation provides assistance and support without regard to religion, politics or ideology. Mr. Fares is also a successful businessman, having founded diverse corporations that now employ over 70,000 people worldwide. He is commonly called upon to share his insights with academic and policy institutions, and has supported universities in the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Both the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University and the American University of Beirut's Issam Fares Institute are renowned for their programs aimed at enhancing understanding of the Middle East. Mr. Fares has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including Grand Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of France, and UNESCO's Golden Medal of Acropole.

Emcee
Riz Khan, Al Jazeera English

Riz Khan is the host of the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English.  Prior to joining Al Jazeera, Khan was a presenter and reporter at the BBC for eight years and was the first mainstream Asian newsreader for their international network. He hosted the news bulletin that launched BBC World Service Television News in 1991.  After presenting there for two years, Khan left BBC for CNN’s international channel, where he became a senior anchor for the network’s global news shows and special events including the historic live coverage of the Hajj. In 1996 he launched his interactive interview show on CNN: Q&A with Riz Khan and he has conducted thousands of interviews with guests including the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.  In 2005 Khan authored his first book: Al-Waleed: Businessman Billionaire Prince, published by Harper Collins.
 
CONFERENCE

Panel Topics

US Middle East Policy in the 2nd Half of the Obama Term
David Makovsky, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Suzanne Maloney, Brookings
Ambassador Edward Djerejian, Baker Institute
Joost Hiltermann, International Crisis Group
Moderator: Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Princeton University

New Approaches to Non-State Armed Actors
David Kilcullen, Center for a New American Security
Robert Malley, International Crisis Group
Mitchell Reiss, Washington College
Moderator: Roger Hardy, Woodrow Wilson Center

Keynote Luncheon featuring address by Dr. Saeb Erakat, Chief Negotiator for the PLO

Shifting Regional Dynamics: Turkey, Israel, Iran and the Arab States
Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich, Tel Aviv University
Omer Taspinar, Brookings
Shibley Telhami, University  of Maryland
Alex Vatanka, Middle East Institute
Moderator: Geneive Abdo, The Century Foundation

Reevaluating US Policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Hassan Abbas, Columbia University
Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations
Brian Katulis, Center for American Progress
Paul Pillar, Georgetown University
Moderator: Caroline Wadhams, The Center for American Progress

BIOS

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Saeb Erakat, Palestine Liberation Organization
Dr. Saeb Erakat is the Chief Negotiator for the PLO and Head of the Steering and Monitoring Committee of the Negotiation Affairs Department.  Previously, Dr. Erakat served as the Minister of Local Government and was appointed the Head of the Central Elections Commission, a post from which he resigned in December 1995 to run for elections in Jericho. He was elected to the PLC in 1996.  Dr. Erakat was Vice-Chair of the Madrid Peace Delegation and was later the Vice-Chair at the Washington negotiations of 1992.  He was appointed the Chairman of the Palestinian delegation for negotiations on elections in 1994, and has since been a senior member of the Palestinian negotiation team. He has been extensively involved in all negotiations with Israel, including those conducted at Camp David (2000) and in Taba (2001). Dr. Erakat is a professor of political science at An-Najah University in Nablus.  He has served on the editorial board of Al-Quds newspaper, and as the Secretary-General of the Arab Studies Society.

Conference Panelists

Dr. Hassan Abbas, Columbia University
Hassan Abbas is the Quaid-i-Azam Professor at Columbia University’s South Asia Institute and a Senior Advisor at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has been named Bernard Schwartz fellow at the Asia Society headquarters in New York and is a visiting fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. Abbas holds a MALD and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, as well as a Master's degree in Political Science from Government College Lahore, Punjab University and an LLM in International Law from School of Law, Nottingham University, UK. His well-acclaimed book, Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror, remains on bestseller lists in Pakistan and India and was widely reviewed, including in New York Times, Boston Globe, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Hindu (India) and Dawn (Pakistan). He also runs WATANDOST, a blog on Pakistan and its neighbors' related affairs.

Dr. Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations
Dr. Stephen D. Biddle is the Roger Hertog senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has previously held positions at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Institute for Defense Analyses, Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2005, his book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, won the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Award Silver Medal. Dr. Biddle is a member of the Defense Policy Board, and has presented testimony before congressional committees on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, force planning, conventional net assessment, and European arms control. Dr. Biddle has also served on military strategic assessment teams for General Stanley McChrystal and General David Patraeus. Dr. Biddle has been awarded Barchi, Rist, and Impact Prizes from the Military Operations Research Society, the U.S. Army Superior Civilian Service Medal, and the US Army Commander’s Award for Public Service in Baghdad. Dr. Biddle holds AB, MPP, and PhD degrees from Harvard University.

Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, James A. Baker Institute
Ambassador Djerejian is the founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. His career in public service has spanned the administrations of eight United States presidents.  He is a leading expert on the complex political, security, economic, religious and ethnic issues of the Middle East. Ambassador Djerejian was a Senior Advisor to the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel mandated by the Congress to assess the current and prospective situation in Iraq in 2006. Prior to his nomination by President Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, he served Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.  He served Presidents Reagan and Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic. Djerejian has also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Deputy Chief of the U.S. Mission to the Kingdom of Jordan, and Special Assistant to President Reagan and Deputy Press Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He is the author of Danger and Opportunity: An American Ambassador's Journey Through the Middle East.
 
Joost Hiltermann, International Crisis Group
Joost Hiltermann is the Deputy Program Director of the Middle East and North Africa for the International Crisis Group (ICG).  Since 2002, Hiltermann has managed a team of analysts based in the Middle East and North Africa to conduct research and write policy-focused reports on factors that increase the risk of and drive armed conflict. He has written extensively on Iraq for ICG, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books and other publications. Prior, he was Executive Director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch and from 1992-1994 served as the Director of the Iraq Documents Project for HRW. His most recent book is A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge, 2007).

Brian Katulis, Center for American Progress
Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at The Center for American Progress, where his work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle East and South Asia. Katulis has served as a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations on projects in more than two dozen countries, including Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, and Colombia. From 1995 to 1998, he lived and worked in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Egypt for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Katulis received a master's degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and a B.A. in history and Arab and Islamic Studies from Villanova University. In 1994 and 1995, he was a Fulbright scholar in Amman, Jordan, where he conducted research on the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. He is co-author of The Prosperity Agenda, a book on U.S. national security published by John Wiley & Sons in 2008.
 
Dr. David Kilcullen, Center for A New American Security

Dr. David Kilcullen is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the President & Chief Executive Officer of Caerus. Kilcullen was previously Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, commanding Multinational Force Iraq. In 2005-6. he was chief counter-terrorism strategist at the U.S. State Department and helped design and implement the Regional Strategic Initiative, the policy that drives United States counter-terrorism diplomacy worldwide. From 2004 to 2005 he was seconded to the Pentagon in Washington D.C. where he wrote the counterterrorism strategy for the 2006 U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review.  A former Australian infantry officer with 22 years’ service, Kilcullen holds several honors and decorations, including the United States Army Superior Civilian Service Medal, the first such award to a foreign national serving in combat alongside U.S. Forces. His book, The Accidental Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, 2009) analyses the complex interplay between local guerrillas and global terrorists in contemporary war zones from Africa to Southeast Asia.

David Makovsky, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow and Director of The Washington Institute's Project on the Middle East Peace Process.  He is also an adjunct lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Mr. Makovsky is the author or coauthor of a variety of publications on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including his latest book (with Dennis Ross), Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.  His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and National Interest.  Before joining The Washington Institute, Mr. Makovsky was an award-winning journalist who covered the peace process from 1989 to 2000. He is the former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post, was diplomatic correspondent for Israel's leading daily, Haaretz, and is a former contributing editor to U.S. News and World Report.

Robert Malley, International Crisis Group
Robert Malley is the Middle East and North Africa Program Director of the International Crisis Group. He directs analysts based in Amman, Cairo, Beirut, Tel Aviv and Baghdad. Together they report on the political, social and economic factors affecting the risk of conflict and make policy recommendations to address these threats. Malley covers events from Iran to Morocco, with a heavy focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, and Islamist movements throughout the region, as well as developments in the United States that affect policy toward the Middle East. Prior to his work at ICG, Mr. Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab Israeli Affairs (1998-2001), Executive Assistant to National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger (199601998) and Director for Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the National Security council (1994-1996).

Suzanne Maloney, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Suzanne Maloney is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on energy, economic reform and U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Maloney has launched a new book project on Iran’s political economy since the Islamic Revolution, and is co-authoring a set of policy recommendations on Iran for the next U.S. administration as part of a joint project of the Saban Center and the Council on Foreign Relations. The U.S. Institute of Peace will publish her monograph on Iran’s relationship with the Muslim world, Iran’s Long Reach, in 2008. Prior to joining Brookings, Maloney was a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, covering Iran, Iraq, the Gulf States and broader Middle East issues. Her career includes positions at ExxonMobil Corporation, where she worked on regional business development, political risk analysis, and corporate outreach and communications. Maloney also directed the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on US Policy toward Iran, chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates.
 
Peter Neumann, King's College, London
Dr. Neumann is a senior lecturer in War Studies at King's College London. He is Co-Director of the Master's Program in Terrorism, Security and Society and the Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence.  He co-authored The Strategy of Terrorism (Routledge 2008) and has recently published a paper entitled “Joining Al Qaeda: Jihadist Recruitment in Europe.” His most recent book is Old and New Terrorism (Polity, 2009).  Dr. Neumann is a member of the Club de Madrid's expert advisory council, as well as of the editorial boards of  Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Democracy and Security. He is an Affiliate of the European Commission's European Network of Experts on Radicalization and serves as a member of the German Federal Criminal Office's European Expert Network on Terrorism Issues.
 
Prof. Paul Pillar, Georgetown University

Paul Pillar is a Visiting Professor and Director of Studies of the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.  He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He has been Executive Assistant to CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence and Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William Webster. He has also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and from 1997 to 1999 was deputy chief of the center. He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1999-2000. Professor Pillar is a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and served on active duty in 1971-1973, including a tour of duty in Vietnam.
 
Itamar Rabinovich, Tel Aviv University
Itamar Rabinovich is a former Israeli Ambassador to the United States and former Chief Negotiator with Syria. He is a Distinguished Global Professor at NYU and a Distinguished Non- Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center. Professor Rabinovich is serves on the board of numerous institutions around the world, including Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and the International Advisory Board of the Brookings Institution. He is also a senior research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle-Eastern studies and co-editor of the Center's new review journal, Bustan. He is the author of numerous books on the modern history and politics of the Middle East, the most recent of which is The View from Damascus: State, Political Community and Foreign Relations in Twentieth-Century Syria (Mitchell Vallentine, 2008).
 
Mitchell Reiss, Washington College  
Mitchell Reiss is president of Washington College. Previously, he was the diplomat-in-residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia where he held a number of leadership positions including vice provost for international affairs, dean and director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies; he also holds appointments in the School of Law and the Government Department and is a senior associate of the CSIS International Security Program.  Reiss was director of the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, where he provided Secretary Colin L. Powell with independent strategic advice and policy recommendations from 2003-2005. In 2003, he was asked to serve concurrently as the President's special envoy for the Northern Ireland Peace Process with the rank of Ambassador. He has also served as the special assistant to the national security adviser at the White House and consultant to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Congressional Research Service, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Reiss has published widely on issues of international trade, security and arms control.  His forthcoming book is entitled Negotiating with Evil: When to Talk to Terrorists.
 
Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations
Ray Takeyh specializes in Iran, the Persian Gulf, and U.S. foreign policy, and he is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Previous to his current position, Dr. Takeyh was the senior advisor to the special adviser for the Gulf and Southwest Asia at the U.S. Department of State. He has held positions of professor at the National War College, director at the Near East and South Asia Center, National Defense University, fellow in international security studies at Yale University and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has also published extensive literature on the subject. His most recent book is The Guardians of the Revolution: Iran’s Approach to the World (Oxford University Press, 2009). He has also written many articles and his commentaries have been featured in many of the premier newspapers of the country, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune.

Ömer Taşpınar, Brookings
Ömer Taşpınar is the Director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution as well as a nonresident Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy. He is a professor at the National War College and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.  Taşpınar is an expert on Turkey, the European Union, Muslims in Europe, political Islam, the Middle East and Kurdish nationalism. He has held consulting positions at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights and at the Strategic Planning Department of TOFAS-FIAT in Istanbul.  Dr. Taşpınar is the author of two books: Political Islam and Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey (Routledge, 2005) and Fighting Radicalism with Human Development: Freedom, Education and Growth in the Islamic World (Brookings, 2006).

Shibley Telhami, Brookings
Shibley Telhami, a nonresident senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, is a former advisor to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and the Iraq Study Group. He is an expert on U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly on the role of the news media in shaping political identity and public opinion in the region.  Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park.  He has served as a member of the US delegation to the Trilateral US-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee and on the US Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World.  Professor Telhami has contributed to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and regularly appears on national and international radio and television He has also co-drafted several Council on Foreign Relations reports on US public diplomacy, on the Arab-Israeli peace process, and on Persian Gulf security.  Telhami is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the Education for Employment Foundation.

Alex Vatanka, Middle East Institute
Alex Vatanka is the Editor of Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. From 2001 to 2009, he was a senior analyst at Jane’s, where he covered the  Middle East, based in London and Washington. He joined the Middle East Institute as a scholar in 2007, and also lectures as a Senior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the US Air Force Special Operations School (USAFSOS). His current area of focus is Iranian domestic, security and foreign policies. He has lectured widely for both governmental and commercial audiences, including the US Department State, various US military branches, US Congressional staff, and Middle Eastern  energy firms.
 
Moderators

Geneive Abdo, The Century Foundation
Geneive Abdo is the director of the Iran program at The Century Foundation and the creator and editor of the website, Inside Iran. Before joining The Century Foundation, Ms Abdo, an author and Middle East  analyst, served as the Liaison for the United Nation’s Alliance of Civilizations. In her 20-year journalism career, Ms. Abdo covered the Middle East and the Islamic world as a correspondent in Iran for The Guardian and The Economist. She was the first American journalist to be based in Tehran in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and earlier reported from Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Georgia. Ms. Abdo was also a Nieman fellow at Harvard University from 2001-2002, the same year that she received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has won research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the United States Institute of Peace. She is the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam. Her  newest book, Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11, is the first detailed, investigative work of the Muslim community in the United States since the 2001 attacks.

Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Princeton University
Ambassador Barbara K. Bodine is a lecturer in public policy and the director of the Scholars in the Nation's Service Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. In her over 30 years in the US Foreign Service, Ms. Bodine served as Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen, in Baghdad as Deputy Principal Officer during the Iran-Iraq War, in Kuwait as Deputy Chief of Mission from 1990 to 1991, and again in Iraq in 2003 as the senior State Department official and the first coalition coordinator for reconstruction. Since leaving the government, Ambassador Bodine has been Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Governance Initiative in the Middle East at the Harvard Kennedy School,  Fellow at the School's Center for Public Leadership and Institute of Politics, and the Robert Wilhelm Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies. Ms. Bodine is also the President of the Mine Action Group, America, a global NGO that provides technical expertise for the removal of remnants of conflict worldwide.

Roger Hardy, Woodrow Wilson Center
Roger Hardy worked for the BBC World Service for over twenty years as a Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst. He wrote and presented a series of radio programmes about the Arab-Israeli conflict, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the role of Islam in such diverse settings as south-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He turned some of his experiences into a book, The Muslim Revolt: A Journey through Political Islam, which was published earlier this year. He is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
 
Caroline Wadhams, The Center for American Progress
Caroline Wadhams is the Director for South Asia Security Studies at American Progress. She focuses on Afghanistan, Pakistan, terrorism issues, and U.S. national security. She recently returned from Afghanistan, where she served as an election observer for Democracy International.  Prior to American Progress, she served as a legislative assistant on foreign policy issues for Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI). Wadhams also worked at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. as the assistant director for the Meetings Program and in New York as a research associate on national security issues. Her overseas experience includes work with the International Rescue Committee in Sierra Leone and two years in Ecuador and Chile. She also served as a U.S. election observer of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections in February 2008. She is a 2005 Manfred Wörner Fellow with the German Marshall Fund and a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She received a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Wadhams has been a guest analyst with numerous international, national, and local news outlets, including CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, FOX, Reuters, and NPR.