The full report on the Conference will be posted shortly.

THE INSTITUTE IS PROUD TO PRESENT AN EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE ON

THE NEW REALITIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

HOW NOT TO READ THE SIGNS

SPEAKERS

Col. Reynolds was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1973 into the Royal Regiment of Artillery. His distinguished career began with extensive service in the British Army of the Rhine in Germany.  Promoted to Major in 1983, he went on to serve as Second-in-Command of the 32nd Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery in the Gulf War. After the war he served in the Ministry of Defence in London and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. In 1998 he deployed on a six month operational tour to Sarajevo. His last military appointment was Director of Public Affairs at NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. He has spent the last few years in the Unites States maintaining strong links with the military by lecturing to senior NATO officers. His consulting work includes a particular emphasis on field security. This has led him to high-level involvement, through the Foreign and Commonwealth office, in European Union crisis management. His latest project was as senior advisor to UNOPS, the United Nations team overseeing the elections in Iraq where he spent some four months. He has singularly unique frontline intelligence experience in the Mid-East from the borders of Pakistan to the Israeli coast. He is currently on a speaking tour of the United States where he has briefed the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives as well as other officials in Congress and within the security establishment.

The Conference will also be addressed by Dr. David Romano, Ph.D. Senior Research Fellow at ICAMES (the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies) at l’Université de Montréal. Dr. Romano was the Department of National Defence Post-Doctoral Fellow at McGill University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and spent much of 2003-2004 in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran conducting research for the Canadian Department of National Defence. He is a world-renowned authority on Mid-East nationalism and the author of “The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity” recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Sharing his unique perspective with us will be Robert Galbraith one of the leading war photojournalists of this generation. Galbraith’s career in journalism spans twenty years. He has written and/or photographed for numerous publications in North America and Europe including the New York Times. His reputation reached new heights when he published “Iraq: Eyewitness to War – A Photojournalist’s Diary”. Galbraith refused to be an embedded reporter with the American forces and he did not want to sit through orchestrated press conferences at the press centre. He wanted total freedom to cover the war. At great personal peril, he managed to cover the war in a way that has rarely been seen. Unlike many in the media, despite the human toll and tragedy he documented, his is a compelling and authentic voice on the importance of a heightened Canadian military and diplomatic engagement in democratic development and nation-building worldwide. He is now in the process of planning a mission to Afghanistan to record the critical role Canadian troops are playing in the Kandahar operation.