Michael Doran

Who is Michael Doran?

Michael Doran is an American expert on the international politics of the Middle East. He is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has been a visiting professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and taught at the University of Central Florida. He was appointed to the National Security Council and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of Defense under the George W. Bush administration.

In Somebody Else's Civil War he argued that the September 11 attacks were part of a religious conflict within the Muslim world. Doran argued that Osama bin Laden's followers: "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity". Hoping that U.S. retaliation would unite the faithful against the West, bin Laden sought to spark revolutions in Arab nations and elsewhere - war with America was never his end; it was just a means to promote radical Islam.