Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War. Mr. Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, he flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests. Mr. Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.

Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.

Event Synopsis:

In this presentation Mr. Hitchens presents a "balance sheet" from point of view of those, like him, who advocated regime change in Iraq and hoped that it would have positive effects in Saudi Arabia and Iran as well. He presents areas where progress has not materialized, such as attempts to revive Iraq's badly damaged oil industry. However, he points out political progress made by Kurds in the north of Iraq, and growing pressure on the regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Attempts to "dry up the swamp" where terrorism breeds have not eliminated but have isolated Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He urges the international community to "make friends" with moderate forces in Muslim countries which reject terrorism, and to pursue policies that continue to isolate extremist groups.

 A discussion period following the talk raised such questions as: Is there a secular democratic alternative to Hamas? In light of difficulties encountered in establishing democratic governance in Iraq, shouldn't there be a reassessment of the belief system that led to the Iraqi operation? What evidence can be found that Iraq was on the verge of collapse prior to the recent military intervention? How do the happenings in the Middle East translate into a policy regarding North Korea, which is vocal about acquiring weapons of mass destruction? With Saddam Hussein gone, can Iraq remain one country? Is there a risk that intervention in places like Iraq has a galvanizing effect on other enemy groups?

For nearly twenty years, an array of mainly Western governments, NGOs, and international organizations including the UN have tried to promote democracy in Burma using sanctions and diplomacy. The net result has been an ever more entrenched military dictatorship, a looming humanitarian crisis, and a possible resumption of armed conflict. How are we to think about this failure in international policy? Thant Myint-U will identify at the core of this external impotence a singularly ahistorical analysis of Burma, its 44-year-old dictatorship, and its even longer-running civil wars. He will also ask: Could things have been handled differently? What does Burmese history tell us about what is and is not possible today? And what are the prospects for constructive change?

Thant Myint-U is a senior visiting fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York City. In 1994-99 he was a fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge University where he taught Indian and colonial history. He has also served for many years in the United Nations, first in three different peacekeeping operations (in Cambodia and ex-Yugoslavia) and then at the United Nations Secretariat in New York. In 2004-05 he was in charge of policy planning in the UN's Department of Political Affairs. He has written two books on Burma: and The River of Lost Footsteps (2006) and The Making of Modern Burma (2000). He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and completed a PhD in modern history at Cambridge in 1996.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

China's population management, with consideration of cultural values impacting the growing sex ratio imbalance in China. Professor Li, along with his collaborator, Professor Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, have been advising the PRC government on this matter for some years now.

Professor Li Shuzhuo is director of the Institute for Population and Development Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong University in China. His many publications include articles in Population Studies, Population Research and Policy Review, Journal of Biosocial Sciences, Social Biology, and the Journal of Comparative Family Studies. His most recent book is Uxorilocal Marriage in Contemporary Rural China (by S. Li, X. Jin, M.W. Feldman, N. Li, and C. Zhu; China Social Sciences Academy Press, in Chinese).

Since 1994, Dr. Li has been an associate and consultant with the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford University. Together with Professor Marcus Feldman and other members of Xi'an Jiaotong - Morrison cooperative projects, Dr. Li has been advising the PRC government on population related policy issues. Dr. Li earned his Ph.D. at Xi'an Jiaotong University in the People's Republic of China.

This seminar is part of the Taiwan/China Seminar Series hosted by Melissa Brown, Assistant Professor, Anthropological Sciences, Stanford University.

David Hafemeister is a Science Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (2005-6). He is also Professor (emeritus) of Physics at California Polytechnic State University. He spent a dozen years in Washington as Professional Staff Member, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Governmental Affairs (1990-93 on arms control treaties at the end of the Cold War), Science Advisor to Senator John Glenn (1975-77), Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Benson and Deputy-Under Secretary Nye (1977-78), Visiting Scientist in the State Department's Office of Nuclear Proliferation Policy (1979), the Office of Strategic Nuclear Policy (1987) and Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences (2000-02). He also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and the Lawrence-Berkeley, Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. He was Chair of the APS Forum on Physics and Society (1985-6) and the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1996-7). He has written/edited ten books and 140 articles and was awarded the APS Szilard award in 1996.

When the first President Bush swiftly crushed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he stated that America had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome." The strategic and regional context of the second President Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq appeared so far removed from the Cold War era and the specifics of the Vietnam War that there seemed to be little point in harking back to that decades-old conflict. Yet starting with the growth of the insurgency in Iraq and the resultant revival of concern with "counter insurgency," the focus on "Iraqification" (with echoes of "Vietnamization"), and even a possible revival of the Kissingerian concept of a "decent interval" before disengaging from Iraq, the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam have reemerged in public discussion. Can we derive any benefit from invoking these parallels, either in better understanding the Vietnam War or in clarifying contemporary challenges in Iraq? Or is the real "lesson of Vietnam" the idea that "lessons" themselves are dangerous and misleading?

David Elliott spent seven years in Vietnam, from 1963 to 1973, in the US Army and with the Rand Corporation. The experience ultimately led to his best-known work: a two-volume, 1500-page book, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta (2002). The New York Review of Books called it "the most comprehensive and enlightening book on that war since June 1971, when The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers." An abridged paperback edition will be published this year. Elliott's PhD is from Cornell, his BA from Yale. His current research is on Vietnam's adaptation to the post-Cold War world.