January 27, 2005

Speaker Biographies

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at AEI. An expert in Middle Eastern affairs, he focuses on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the former Soviet Union, as well as terrorism and intelligence. He is the author of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran (1997) and a chapter on Iran in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (2000). He is also currently working on a book titled For Their Eyes Only. He is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard. Mr. Gerecht was formerly the director of the Middle East Initiative for the Project for the New American Century and a Middle Eastern specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (2004, AEI Press).

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, just returned from a research trip to Iraq, is a resident scholar at AEI, focusing on Arab democracy and domestic politics in Iran and Iraq. He is also the editor of Middle East Quarterly. 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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