Fever Pitch: The United States and Iran

Speaker Bios

Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran, the Persian Gulf States, energy, and economic reform, is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Maloney is a former member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff where she worked on Iran, the Persian Gulf, and broader regional issues. Her research focuses on political and economic dynamics in Iran, as well as economic reform and energy issues in the Middle East. Prior to joining the State Department, Maloney was the Middle East advisor at ExxonMobil Corporation. She served as project director of the Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward Iran for the Council on Foreign Relations, whose report, Iran: Time for a New Approach, recommended a strategy for engaging Iran. Maloney was the recipient of an International Affairs Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and has previously served at Brookings as an Olin Fellow and a Brookings research fellow.

Maloney is the author of a forthcoming U.S. Institute of Peace book on Iran’s relationship with the Islamic world. She received a Ph.D. and an M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Karim Sadjadpour is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He joined Carnegie after four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Tehran and Washington, D.C. A leading researcher on Iran, Sadjadpour has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials, and hundreds with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.

He is a regular contributor to BBC World TV and radio, CNN, National Public Radio, and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and has also written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic. Frequently called upon to brief U.S. and EU officials about Middle Eastern affairs, he has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, and spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations and Asia Society. Sadjadpour was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Gary Sick is a senior research scholar at SIPA’s Middle East Institute, and an adjunct professor of international affairs at SIPA. He is the author of All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran (Random House 1985) and October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (Random House 1991).

Professor Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. He was the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy. He is also a member of the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and the chairman of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East. He was the executive director of Gulf/2000, an international research project on political, economic, and security developments in the Persian Gulf, being conducted at Columbia University from 1994 to 1995 on behalf of the W. Alton Jones and Rockefeller Foundations. He received his BA from Kansas University in 1957 and a Master of Science from George Washington University in 1970. In 1973 he earned a PhD from Columbia.

MODERATOR

Steven Simon is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Council, Mr. Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs at the RAND Corporation. He was previously the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Carol Deane senior fellow in U.S. security studies. Before moving to Britain in 1999, Mr. Simon served at the White House for over five years as director for global issues and senior director for transnational threats. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia.  These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State.

Mr. Simon is the author of the February 2007 Council Special Report “After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq.” He is the coauthor of The Age of Sacred Terror (Random House, 2002), which won the Council on Foreign Relations 2004 Arthur Ross Book Award, and coeditor of Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change (Oxford University Press/IISS, 2003). He is also the coauthor of Building a Successful Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005) and The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005). Most recently, he coauthored The Next Attack (Henry Holt, 2005), which examines the evolution of the jihad since September 11, 2001, and America’s response, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2006.Mr. Simon has published in Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Times, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Survival, the National Interest, World Policy Journal, and other journals. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Fox, and NPR. Mr. Simon has a BA from Columbia University in classics and Near Eastern languages, an MTS from the Harvard Divinity School, and an MPA from Princeton University. He was a university fellow at Brown University and an international affairs fellow at Oxford University.