Speaker biographies
Robert Malley has been director of the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program since January 2002. Prior to that, he was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Until January 2001, Mr. Malley was special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs and director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). In this capacity, he served as a principal adviser to the president and the national security advisor on the Middle East peace process. From July 1997 to September 1998, he was executive assistant to then–national security advisor Samuel R. Berger. Mr. Malley joined the NSC staff in August 1994 as director for democracy. He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991–92. He is the author of The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam (University of California Press, 1996).
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).
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI, a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Civil-Military Relations, and the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Rubin previously served as an Iran and Iraq country director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as a political adviser in the Coalition Provisional Authority. He is the author of two books about Iranian history and politics, most recently Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and he publishes articles in a range of scholarly and policy journals. Mr. Rubin lectures frequently on the politics, culture, and strategy of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and South Asian countries to senior military officers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a regular contributor to major U.S. and Middle Eastern newspapers.
Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he is working on a project on liberal trends and sectarianism in the Arab media. An analyst who specializes in the Levant, Mr. Smith is also a widely published journalist whose articles on Arab and Islamic affairs have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, Asharq Al-Awsat, and The Weekly Standard and on Slate and NOW Lebanon. Mr. Smith has just completed a book on post-9/11 Arab politics, society, and culture titled The Strong Horse: The Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday, forthcoming).
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