October 14, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Basil Al-Rahim is a merchant banker with MerchantBridge & Co. Ltd (London) and a founder and board member of the Iraq Foundation. He is currently consulting on foreign investment in Iraq. Previously, he was president and chief executive officer of the Safron Corporation, managing director of the Carlyle Group, and founder and executive director of Dar Al-Amana, a private investment company in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was an active member of the Iraqi exile community and postwar reconstruction planning efforts.

Salem Chalabi, esq., is a lawyer focusing on privatizations, banking, and securities law. He has practiced corporate and finance law at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius from 1993 to 1997 and, beginning in 1997, was recruited to help start the U.S. securities practice at the London office of Clifford Chance, the world's largest law firm. In September 2002, he took a leave of absence from Clifford Chance to focus on the transition in postwar Iraq. He participated in two of the State Department's "Future of Iraq" projects-the Democratic Principles Working Group (for which he served as a coordinator) and the Transitional Justice Working Group (for which he served as rapporteur). In March 2003, he traveled to Kuwait to assist ORHA on reconstruction and legal issues, later going to Baghdad in April 2003. When the Governing Council was formed, he became a member of the legal and finance committees of the council, where he was the principal drafter of the Statute of the Iraqi Special Tribunal and the statute establishing the Iraqi Property Claims Commission and responsible for coordinating, in conjunction with the CPA, the drafting of  the foreign investment laws, the new companies and securities law, the banking law, and various other commercially related laws.  In January 2004, he was chosen to be chairman of the Transitional Administrative Law Drafting Committee, where he acted as one of the two principal Iraqi co-drafters of the Transitional Administrative Law. In April 2004, he was appointed to be the director of administration of the Iraqi Special Tribunal. 

Rend Rahim was the ambassador-designate of Iraq to the United States until October 2004. She is a founding member of the Iraq Foundation, and previously acted as its executive director. In that capacity, she worked extensively with the Iraqi community in northern Iraq and in exile and traveled to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq on numerous occasions. Ms. Rahim was the editor of Iraqi Issues, the Foundation's periodical from 1992-1998.  She has published many essays and articles on Iraq, including a chapter titled "The Iraqi Opposition" in Iraq After the Gulf War (ZED Books, 1994); "Iraq: Race for the Finish Line" in Middle East Insight; and "The Iraqi Opposition and the Sanctions Issue" in Middle East Report. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Washington Times and The Boston Globe. She is the coauthor of a book titled The Arab Shi'a, published by St. Martin's Press in February 2000.

Ali Ramadhan is a lawyer from Basra, Iraq, who is working on grassroots democracy building as a contractor for Research Triangle Associates. Mr. Ramadhan helped organize and monitored the Basra city council's first elections in 2004, and participates in local governing body meetings as an advisor and facilitator. Immediately after the liberation of Iraq, from June 2003 to February 2004, Mr. Ramadhan worked on school reconstruction projects and oversaw the distribution of educational supply kits to 1.5 million students, 50,000 teachers, and 25,000 classrooms in the cities of Basra, Messan, Nassirya and Mothana.

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. 

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI, focusing on Arab democracy and domestic politics in Iran and Iraq. Before returning to AEI, Mr. Rubin was a political adviser in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and an assistant on Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was a visiting lecturer on international relations and history at Hebrew University (Jerusalem) from 2001-2002 and at the Universities of Sulaymani, Salahuddin, and Duhok (Iraqi Kurdistan) from 2000-2001. From 1999-2000, he was a Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a visiting lecturer in history at Yale University.

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