US diplomat reflects on Middle East peace efforts at Baker Institute lecture May 7

US diplomat reflects on Middle East peace efforts at Baker Institute lecture May 7

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller will discuss his experiences trying to achieve a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians at a May 7 lecture at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

	AARON DAVID MILLER

Miller spent much of the last 25 years working at the U.S. State Department as an adviser to six secretaries of state. He helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli peace process, most recently as the senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He also served as the deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations, senior member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and in the Office of the Historian. He has received the department’s Distinguished, Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Miller’s Baker Institute lecture, titled “America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace: A Negotiator Looks Back,” will focus on why one of the world’s greatest powers has failed to broker or impose a solution. He will also discuss what it would take to achieve peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and why, after so many years of conflict and failure, Americans should even care.

Miller received his doctorate in American diplomatic and Middle East history from the University of Michigan in 1977 and joined the State Department the following year. During 1982 and 1983, he was a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1984 he served a temporary tour at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Between 1998 and 2000, Miller served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

He has written three books on the Middle East, including “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace” (March 2008).

Miller is currently a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. in James A. Baker III Hall’s Doré Commons.

Rice faculty, staff and students who want to attend must RSVP by e-mail (<bipprsvp@rice.edu>) or by fax (713-348-5993).