Speaker Biographies

Sam Brownback is a U.S. senator from Kansas. In 1986, Brownback was chosen as the youngest secretary of agriculture in Kansas state history and served for one year as a White House fellow in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. In 1994, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, representing the Second District of Kansas. In 1996, the people of Kansas elected Sam Brownback as their thirty-second U.S. senator, filling out the unexpired portion of Senator Bob Dole's term. In 1998, they elected him to a full six-year term and he was reelected to a second term in November of 2004. Brownback currently serves on four committees: the Appropriations Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Helsinki Commission, for which he is chairman. Throughout his career, Brownback has worked as an administrator, broadcaster, attorney, teacher, and author.

Patrick Clawson is deputy director for research of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His previous positions include five years as senior research professor at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and four years each as senior economist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Clawson has published op-ed articles in several major newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. In addition to his frequent appearances on television and radio, he has authored more than thirty scholarly articles on the Middle East in such journals as Foreign Affairs, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal, and Les Cahiers de l’Orient. He has also testified before congressional committees more than a dozen times. Currently serving as senior editor of Middle East Quarterly, he was previously editor of Orbis, a quarterly review of foreign affairs. In November 2005, Mr. Clawson, along with Michael Rubin of AEI, published Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan).

George Perkovich is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In this capacity, he oversees the entire research program, across all subject areas. His personal research has focused on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation, with an emphasis on South Asia. He is the author of India's Nuclear Bomb (University of California Press, 2001), which received the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association for outstanding work by an independent scholar, and the A.K. Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies as an outstanding book on South Asia. Perkovich recently coauthored a major Carnegie report, Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, which serves as a blueprint for rethinking the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. Perkovich is also developing a project on fairness in the international system, drawing on his interests in trade and globalization. From 1990 through 2001, Perkovich was director of the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a $400 million philanthropic institution located in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time of the Foundation’s division in 2001, he also served as deputy director for programs. Perkovich served as a speechwriter and foreign policy advisor to Senator Joe Biden  (D-DE)from 1989 to 1990.

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. She recently served as a member of the congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations, established by the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to AEI, she 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. Ms. Pletka has also been a journalist based in Washington, D.C. and the Middle East.

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