Jon Alterman is director and senior fellow of the CSIS Middle East Program. Prior to joining CSIS, he served as a member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State and as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. He served as an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group and is a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Before entering government, he was a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. From 1993 to 1997, Alterman taught at Harvard. He also worked as a legislative aide to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY), responsible for foreign policy and defense. He is the author or coauthor of three books on the Middle East and the editor of a fourth. In addition to his academic work, he is a frequent commentator in print, on radio, and on television. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Middle East Journal and Transnational Broadcasting Studies and is a former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alterman received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.