March 23, 2005

Speaker Biographies

Murat Mercan is a founding member and deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).  A parliamentary deputy from Eskisehir, he is a member of the European Commission Parliamentarian Group and head of the Turkish Delegation to the Western European Union Assembly.  After receiving a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Bosphorus University, Mr. Mercan received a Ph.D. from the university of Florida.  He is currently on the faculty of Bilkent University.

Richard Perle is a resident fellow at AEI. Mr. Perle served as member of the Defense Policy Board and a consultant to the secretary of defense during President Bush’s first term. He was the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy and the chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization High Level Defense Group from 1981 to 1987. Mr. Perle writes frequently for the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Daily Telegraph, among others. He is the editor of Reshaping Western Security (1991) and the author of Hard Line (1992). His most recent book is An End to Evil (2004), co-authored with AEI fellow David Frum.

Robert Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal. He writes often on foreign affairs, and was based in the Journal's Brussels office from 1995-2000.  In 2003, Mr. Pollock was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the editorial writing category for "his clear, compelling editorials on the Food and Drug Administration's delay in approval of new cancer drugs." In 2002, he was named runner-up in the inaugural Frederic Bastiat Prize for Journalism awards held in London. The Bastiat Prize honors journalists whose writing supports the institutions of a free society such as economic liberty and the rule of law, especially in the developing world. Born in Buffalo, New York, Mr. Pollock received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Yale University.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI and editor of The Middle East Quarterly. Between 2002 and 2004, Mr. Rubin worked as a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.  He has previously worked as a lecturer in history at Yale University, Hebrew University, and at three different universities in northern Iraq. Mr. Rubin is the author of Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (2001), and co-author (with Patrick Clawson) of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos, forthcoming from Palgrave in June 2005.  He received a bachelor’s degree in biology and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.

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