Talk:Daniel P. Serwer

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Serwer was the executive director of the 2006 Baker-Hamilton Commission (aka Iraq Study Group).

From USIP website:

Daniel P. Serwer is the Institute's director of Peace and Stability Operations and its Balkans Initiative. He coordinates the Institute's on-the-ground efforts in conflict zones, including nonviolent conflict strategies, facilitated dialogue, and postconflict reconstruction. He has worked on preventing interethnic and interreligious conflict in Iraq, and has been deeply engaged in facilitating dialogue between Kosovo Serbs and Albanians.

Serwer was a senior fellow at the Institute working on Balkan regional security in 1998–99 and before that was a minister-counselor at the Department of State, where he won six performance awards. As State Department director of European and Canadian analysis in 1996–97, he supervised the analysts who tracked Bosnia and Dayton implementation as well as the deterioration of the security situation in Albania and Kosovo. Serwer served from 1994 to 1996 as U.S. special envoy and coordinator for the Bosnian Federation, mediating between Croats and Muslims and negotiating the first agreement reached at the Dayton peace talks. From 1990 to 1993, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rome; as such, he led a major diplomatic mission through the end of the Cold War and the entire course of the Gulf War. Serwer is co-author of Institute publications on Iraq as well as Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.

Wee bout of punditry

Any "expert" commenting about Iraq on CNN or Fox raises questions about his/her role. On Dec. 22, 2004, Serwer appeared as a commentator on CNN pertaining the "security" and "prospects for elections" in Iraq following his recent trip to the area. His comments were parallel to those pushed by the Bush administration: war against terrorism, and disaffected "Sunnis" forming the bulk of the resistance. NB: According to Serwer, the cause of the continuing fighting has all to do with internal Iraqi politics and who will share the spoils. In his analysis the U.S. does not feature as a causal factor for the continued fighting.

Organizing provocateurs

Serwer was involved in training the Otpor youth provocateurs in Serbia. And:

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

Other

In the early 1990s Serwer worked under the US Ambassador to Italy, Peter F. Secchia, as the Deputy Chief of Mission.