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Advisory Council

The Advisory Council's principal function is to keep us in touch with a broad public audience, identifying its principal concerns, and helping the Center to shape its research and teaching programs and disseminate its message and its findings.

Over time, we hope that the Center will come to play a non-trivial role in shaping public policy affecting the region, and even the region's very identity. We want the Council to be a strong partner in developing strategies to make that so.

 

 

Carrie Denning

Carrie Denning graduated from Stanford in 2009 with an MA in Sociology (Organizations, Business, and the Economy). and a BA in History (History of Science) and Art History (Urbanism and Architecture). While at Stanford, Carrie worked as a research assistant at the Spatial History Lab, and was the lead author on a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Biological Conservation entitled "Did Land Protection in Silicon Valley Reduce the Housing Stock?" She also held internships in the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program and at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Associates. All this, while leading a winning sailing team at Stanford, and winning several academic research grants and awards.

After graduating, Carrie spent a summer in Mumbai, India, working with Bombay First and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, and then had a yearlong Lorry I. Lokey Fellowship at Environmental Defense, where she co-authored "The Good Haul," a report on freight transportation innovations that reduce environmental impacts and improve supply chain throughput. She then worked at IBM as a senior consultant on intelligent transportation systems, and is now pursuing an MBA at Stanford.

 

Bob Ducommun

Fourth-generation Californian Bob Ducommun is a director of Ducommun Incorporated, which is the oldest ongoing business in California, started in Los Angeles as a general store and trade station by his great-grandfather in 1849. Today the company manufactures high-tolerance metal, composite, and electronic parts as part of the aerospace industry food chain. Bob is chairman of the company’s corporate governance and nominating committee, and serves as a member of its audit committee.
 
Bob graduated from Stanford in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in history. With close to 50 other recent Stanford graduates, he went on to the Harvard Business School, from which he graduated in 1978. He lives in New York City with his wife, Lynn, and three daughters. Along with his sister, Electra, he has been active in the University’s development activities for many years, supporting initiatives in undergraduate education, the School of Education, the Cantor Arts Center, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Bob also serves as a trustee of several nonprofit organizations including The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and The Episcopal School in New York City. He was a trustee of St. George’s School in Newport, R.I., where he served as the board treasurer for 15 years.

 

Hope Eccles

Hope Eccles is a lifelong Westerner with deep family roots in the Intermountain West. The Eccles family has been integral in the development of Utah and the Intermountain West since the 19th century, organizing many of the region's key companies in a wide range of businesses, including banking and finance, sugar beet refining, lumber, construction and mining, and railroads. Hope and her family have generations of love for and commitment to the West and the western way of life.

Hope oversees her family's luxury hotel, the Goldener Hirsch Inn, in Deer Valley, Utah. She has been actively involved in the community for many years and particularly in the area of education. She has served on the University of Utah's Board of Trustees, as Vice-Chair of the Board and Chair of the Audit Committee. She is also on the board of the Utah Museum of Natural History and has been President of the University of Utah College of Law Alumni Association. She has also served as the Deputy for Higher Education for Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. She is the Chair of the C. Comstock Clayton Foundation and is a member of the Board of the Marriner S. Eccles Foundation.

Hope is a graduate of Stanford University, she received a JD from the University of Utah and an MBA from Columbia University. She is married to Randal Quarles, Managing Director at the Carlyle Group and former Under Secretary of the Treasury. They have three children and divide their time between Washington DC, and Salt Lake City.

 

John Ford

John Ford

John Ford is Vice Chancellor, University Development and Alumni Relations at UCSF. Previously, Ford served Stanford’s development efforts for more 30 years and rose through the ranks to become the university’s chief fundraiser. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Stanford in 1971, and began his development career at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago.

Joining Stanford in 1977 as a development officer at the Medical Center, he served as director of Medical Development from 1980 to 1986. He became the university’s associate vice president for development in 1986 and vice president for development in 1988. In 2001, Ford received the Kenneth M. Cuthbertson Award, which recognizes exceptional service to Stanford University. Ford was cited for “setting and achieving sustained, record-setting fundraising goals that are acutely sensitive to the university’s academic priorities.” The citation also praised Ford’s “clear vision, leadership and high ethical standards.”

When Ford retired in 2008, Stanford President John Hennessy said: “Under John’s leadership, Stanford has been higher education’s development leader for the past 20 years, launching the first billion-dollar campaign, The Centennial Campaign, followed later by the first ever billion-dollar effort focused exclusively on undergraduate education, The Campaign for Undergraduate Education. Finally, The Stanford Challenge again is setting the pace for 21st-century fundraising campaigns.”

 

David J. Hayes

David J. Hayes is a distinguished visiting lecturer at the Stanford Law School and is serving as a Senior Fellow at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. From 2009 until July 2013, Hayes served as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior, where he was the Chief Operating Officer and second in command to the Secretary, with line authority over Interior’s 70,000 employees, $12 billion budget, and the Department's 10 major bureaus and agencies.

Throughout his career, Hayes has been involved in developing progressive solutions to environmental and natural resources challenges. Prior to serving as the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Hayes was a leader in the President's Transition Team, heading the energy and environmental agency review process. He previously served as the Deputy Secretary and counselor to the Secretary of the Interior from 1997 to 2001 in the Clinton Administration. Hayes worked for many years in the private sector, where he chaired the Environment, Land and Resources Department at Latham and Watkins, an international law firm. He is a former chairman of the Board of the Environmental Law Institute; he was a consulting professor at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment; he served as a Senior Fellow for the World Wildlife Fund; he was the Vice-Chair of the Board of American Rivers; and he is the former Chairman of the Board of Visitors for Stanford Law School.

Hayes is a native of Rochester, New York. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and received his J.D. from Stanford University, where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review.

 

David M. Kennedy

A founding co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, David Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kennedy received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1999 for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War. He received an A.B. in History from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women’s history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

 

Nelson Ishiyama

Nelson Ishiyama is the president of Ishiyama Corporation, a diversified family company with operations in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the Far East. He previously practiced antitrust litigation for 17 years. He left the practice of law to build and operate Henry's Fork Lodge in Idaho. He is an avid outdoorsman and passionate fly fisherman with strong interests in environmental issues and the natural sciences.

He has served as a trustee of the California Academy of Sciences for 12 years and the boards of the Exploratorium, Hearing Society for the Bay Area and the Henry's Fork Foundation. He has also been a member of the Stanford Law School Board of Visitors. He is a director of the Ishiyama Foundation.

Nelson received his B.A. from Stanford and his joint JD/MBA degrees from Stanford Law School and Graduate School of Business. He is a longtime resident of Palo Alto and is married to Terrie McDonald. They have a daughter, Julia, who graduated from Stanford in 2013.

 

Bill Landreth

Bill Landreth is a fifth-generation Californian who grew up in Oakland. He graduated from Stanford and Harvard Business School. He has worked for Goldman Sachs for 38 years and was a senior partner, chairing the International Executive Committee. At Stanford he has served in many positions including Board of Trustees, Stanford Management Company, Institute for International Studies, Cantor Arts Center, Woods Institute for Environment, and School of Education. He has also been a lecturer in Continuing Studies. He also serves on board of California Nature Conservancy. Bill is married to Jeanne and has two children and four grandchildren. Bill lives in Carmel, California and Sun Valley, Idaho.

 

Bill Lilley

William Lilley III is co-founder and chairman of iMapData Inc., an information company that delivers globally-based geo-spatial intelligence on a web-based platform enabling users to visualize data and create maps and reports by accessing and merging databases on socio-demographics, physical infrastructure, institutional infrastructure (schools, universities, places of worship, police stations, fire stations, etc.), political boundaries. elected officials, taxes, regulations, businesses, jobs, and specific industry data. Lilley has made iMapData available to the Center for scholars and students to work on multiple issues involving the American West—e.g., measuring water availability and usage in California, analyzing where the West is rich and where it is poor, and measuring different ways that the rural American West has changed over the last century.

Lilley's initial interest in the West came from his Yale academic work, especially his PhD dissertation which focused on economic and political development in California and Nevada in the late 19th century. Lilley subsequently taught American history at Yale for eight years and then left academia for several different careers. First Lilley worked in the government, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, then as Director of the U.S. Council on Wage & Price Stability, and then as Staff Director of the Budget Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lilley left government to work in the private sector for CBS Inc., the media company in New York, where he was Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs for seven years.

Lilley also has published extensively, mostly during his years at Yale and at iMapData. His writings have focused on how government policies affect local economic activity, on the economics of professional sports businesses and on the socio-economic makeup of U.S. state and local political jurisdictions.

 

Harold Montgomery

Harold MontgomeryHarold Montgomery is the Chairman and CEO of Calpian, Inc. (OTC: CLPI), an electronic payment processing company with operations in the US and India, where the company operates the country’s largest cell phone-based payment network. Montgomery has 23 years' experience in the transaction processing business, and is a widely known industry authority, speaker at regional and national trade shows, and writer for industry journals. He has been a resource for the Federal Reserve Bank Card Payment Center in Philadelphia and has testified before Congress as an expert witness on credit card legislation. Montgomery is a native of Dallas, Texas. He received his BA and MBA degrees from Stanford University. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Communities Foundation of Texas and the Board of St. Mark’s School of Texas. He has served as President of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations and Young Audiences of Greater Dallas. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and was a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization from 1991 to 2009.

 

Sandra Day O'Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor received her B.A. and LL.B. from Stanford University. She served as Deputy County Attorney of San Mateo County, California from 1952–1953 and as a civilian attorney for Quartermaster Market Center, Frankfurt, Germany from 1954–1957. From 1958–1960, she practiced law in Maryvale, Arizona, and served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona from 1965–1969. She was appointed to the Arizona State Senate in 1969 and was subsequently reelected to two two-year terms. In 1975 she was elected Judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court and served until 1979, when she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. President Reagan nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat September 25, 1981. Justice O'Connor retired from the Supreme Court on January 31, 2006.

Retired from the Supreme Court she is currently a Member of the Executive Board, ABA Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative, 1990-present; Member, Board of Trustees, Rockefeller Foundation, 2006-present; Chancellor, College of William and Mary, 2005-present; member, Advisory Board, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2006-present; member, ABA Commission on Civic Education and Separation of Powers, 2005-present; member, Executive Committee, ABA Museum of Law, 2000-present; member, Advisory Commission, ABA Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress, 2002-present; member, Advisory Committee, American Society of International Law, Judicial, 2001-present; honorary chair, America's 400th Anniversary: Jamestown 2007, 2006-present; co-chair, National Advisory Council, Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2005-present; member, Selection Committee, Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, 2005-present; member, Advisory Board, Stanford Center on Ethics, 2005-present. (Photo credit;.Dane Penland, Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)

 

Nancy Pfund

Nancy Pfund is a managing partner of DBL Investors, a venture capital firm in San Francisco that aims to combine top-tier financial returns with meaningful social, economic and environmental returns in the regions in which it invests.

DBL, originally a regional venture capital group within JPMorgan, became an independent firm in January 2008. Nancy was with JPMorgan (then Hambrecht & Quist) from 1984, first as a securities analyst and then as a venture capital partner and managing director.

Nancy is a member of the board of the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF); an advisor to the CalCEF Angel Fund; a member of the advisory board of the UC Davis Center for Energy Efficiency; and a founding officer and director of ABC2, a foundation aimed at accelerating a cure for brain cancer. She sponsors or sits on the board of BrightSource Energy, eMeter, Pandora, SolarCity, Solaria, and Tesla Motors. She speaks frequently on environmental investing, environmental policy, and mission-related investing.

Nancy received her BA and MA in anthropology from Stanford University and her MBA from the Yale School of Management.

 

William K. Reilly

William K. Reilly is a Founding Partner of Aqua International Partners, a private equity fund dedicated to investing in companies engaged in water and renewable energy, and a Senior Advisor to TPG, an international investment partnership. Mr. Reilly served as the first Payne Visiting Professor at Stanford University (1993-1994), administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1989-1993), President of the World Wildlife Fund (1985-1989), President of The Conservation Foundation (1973-1989), and Director of the Rockefeller Task Force on Land Use and Urban Growth from (1972-1973). He was head of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Earth Summit at Rio in 1992.

Mr. Reilly is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the World Wildlife Fund, Co-Chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy, and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University. He is a Director of the Packard Foundation, the American Academy in Rome and the National Geographic Society. By appointment of the President, he serves as one of the seven members of the Presidio Trust of San Francisco, which manages The Presidio National Park. He also serves on the Board of Directors of DuPont, ConocoPhillips and Royal Caribbean International. In 2007, Mr. Reilly was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds a B.A. degree from Yale, J.D. from Harvard and M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University.

 

Timothy Wirth

Timothy Wirth is the Vice Chair of the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund. Both organizations were founded in 1998 through a major financial commitment from Ted Turner to support and strengthen the work of the United Nations. Wirth began his political career as a White House Fellow under President Lyndon Johnson and was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education in the Nixon Administration. In 1970, Wirth returned to his home state and ran successfully for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974. He represented Denver suburbs in Congress from 1975-1987. Wirth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986 where he focused on environmental issues, particularly global climate change and population stabilization. In 1988, he organized the historic Hansen hearings on climate change. With his close friend, the late Senator John Heinz (R-PA), he authored “Project 88”, outlining the groundbreaking “Cap and Trade” idea which became law in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

He authored the far-reaching Colorado Wilderness Bill which became law in 1993, and with Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) he authored major legislation focused on population stabilization. Wirth served in the U.S. Department of State as the first Undersecretary for Global Affairs from 1993 to 1997. He helped organize U.S. foreign policy in the areas of refugees, population, environment, science, human rights and narcotics. As President of the UN Foundation (UNF) since its inception in early 1998, Wirth has organized and led the formulation of the Foundation’s mission and program priorities, which include the environment, women and population, children’s health, and peace, security and human rights. Prior to entering politics, Wirth was in private business in Colorado. The son of teachers, he was a scholarship student and graduate of Harvard College, served as a Harvard “Baby Dean” after graduation, and received a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Wirth is married to Wren Wirth, the President of the environmentally oriented Winslow Foundation; they have two grown children and four grandchildren.

 

Martha Wyckoff

Martha Wyckoff is a Seattle-based community investor contributing time, energy, and resources toward land conservation, the arts, the environment, and civic engagement. She served on the national board of The Trust for Public Land from 1996 to 2009, and currently is an emeritus board member. Other boards on which she serves are the Seattle University Board of Regents, the Seattle Art Museum, the Olympic Sculpture Park committee (co-chair), the Central Waterfront Design Oversight Committee for the redesign of the Seattle waterfront, the Teanaway Community Forest Advisory Committee to create a new community forest in the State of Washington for the Department of Natural Resources, and the TEW Foundation.

In addition to helping raise money for civic and philanthropic causes, she raises hay in Central Washington with her husband and three sons. Holding a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Tufts University, Martha has worked as a design engineer in New York and Washington states. Recently, Martha has embarked on a project to write, with a co-author, a full life biography of John A. McCone. She believes his story is worth telling as a notable industrialist of California and a public servant during the 20th century.

In her free time, Martha and her husband, Jerry, spend time traveling, fly-fishing, cycling, hiking and visiting parks and open spaces from the inner city to the wilderness.

 

Former Advisory Council Members

 

John Bryson

John Bryson is the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and the retired chair and CEO of Edison International. Bryson’s career has spanned the public and private sectors, with a focus on energy, natural resources, and law. He joined Edison in February 1984 and was elected chair and CEO of SCEcorp—now Edison International—and Southern California Edison in 1990. During Bryson's nearly 18 years as CEO of Edison International, its subsidiary Southern California Edison became the nation's leader in the development, demonstration, and use of clean energy, including customer energy efficiency programs, renewable power sources, and smart grid technologies.

Previously, he had been a partner in the law firm of Morrison and Foerster. From 1979 to 1982, he served as president of the California Public Utilities Commission. Before that, he served nearly three years as chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board. Earlier, he practiced law and served as a co-founder and attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Bryson is a director of The Boeing Company, W. M. Keck Foundation, and The Walt Disney Company, and a senior advisor to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. He is also a trustee of the California Institute of Technology. In addition, he serves or has served on a number of educational, environmental, and other nonprofit boards, including the California Business Roundtable (which he chaired), Stanford University’s board of trustees, and the Public Policy Institute of California. Bryson holds a B.A. from Stanford University ('65) and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

 

Tom Brokaw

In 2004, Brokaw became a special correspondent to NBC News after 21 years as anchor and managing editor. Brokaw continues to report and produce and provide expertise during breaking news events for NBC News. His long-form documentaries "Tom Brokaw Reports," have tackled such diverse topics as literacy, affirmative action, drunk driving, corporate scandals, immigration policies, and race.

He has covered every presidential election since 1968 and was NBC's White House correspondent during the national trauma of Watergate (1973-1976). From 1984 to 2004, Brokaw anchored all of NBC's political coverage, including primaries, national conventions and election nights, and moderated nine primary and/or general election debates.

Brokaw's insight, ability and integrity have earned him numerous awards for his journalistic achievements, including several Emmy, Overseas Press Club and National Headliner awards in addition to his two Peabody and duPont awards. In 2003, "NBC Nightly News" was honored with the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast, representing the program's fourth consecutive win in this category. In addition to his broadcast journalism career, Brokaw has written articles, essays and commentary for several publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated, Life, National Geographic, Outside and Interview. In 1998, he published the best selling The Greatest Generation followed by The Greatest Generation Speaks in 1999, and three other very successful titles.

Mimi Gardner Gates

Mimi Gardner Gates has served as the Seattle Art Museum Director from May 1994 to June 2009, and is currently director emeritus. As Museum Director, Gates aggressively led the museum forward, leading significant capital projects, including building a new downtown expanded art museum (2007), creation of the award-winning waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park (2007), and establishment of a conservation department and studio (2000). Mimi came to the Seattle Art Museum from the Yale University Art Gallery where she joined the curatorial staff in 1975, serving as Curator of Asian art through 1987 and as director from 1987 to 1994.

Mimi has served as president and trustee of the Association of Art Museum Directors, chaired the Federal Indemnity panel (1999–2002) at The National Endowment for the Arts, sat on the Advisory Board of the Getty Leadership Institute and is currently on the Governing Board of the Yale University Art Gallery. She is on the Board of the Northwest African American Museum, the Greater Seattle YWCA, Downtown Seattle Association, and Copper Canyon Press and a fellow of the Yale Corporation.

Mimi received a B.A. from Stanford University in history; an Honors diploma in Chinese Language and Culture from the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, Paris; an M.A. degree in Oriental and Chinese studies from the University of Iowa (1970) and a PhD. in Art History from Yale University (1981).

Pamela Rymer

Judge Pamela Rymer was a United States Circuit Judge, Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Before that she was  a United States District Judge, Central District of California from 1983-1989. Her career includes former partnership roles at Toy and Rymer and Lillick McHose & Charles. She also served on the faculty at Pepperdine University in the Judicial Clerkship Institute, and was a Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute on International Studies International Fellows Program, at Stanford.

Judge Rymer  served on several high level judicial committees dealing with issues of education, criminal law, and gender-based violence. She was part of many committees working on the judicial role in the advancement of science and technology. She chaired or directed at least seven California State Commissions addressing higher education, substance abuse, and addiction.

She also served as a Stanford Trustee, and chair or member of committees on Academic Policy, Planning and Management, and Athletics and several others. At the Stanford Law School, she was, among other roles, chair of the Board of Visitors and a member of the Dean's Advisory Council.

 

Jeanne Sedgwick

Jeanne Sedgwick graduated from Stanford in 1972 with a BA in English. Jeanne is the former director of the Conservation Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, California. She oversaw the program's growth from an annual grants budget of $500,000 in 1989 to $100 million in 2000. Under her direction in 1998, the Conservation Program launched the 5-year, $175 million Conserving California Landscapes Initiative, which helped protect nearly 500,000 acres of California's critical habitats.

She has served in a variety of board positions, most recently including chairman of the board of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, the national affinity group of private foundations working on biodiversity conservation, and vice chairman of the board of trustees at Phillips Brooks School, an independent school in Menlo Park, California.

She is a member of the strategic planning committee at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve here at Stanford, and is a board member of the Resources Legacy Fund.

 

 

Alan K. Simpson

Alan Simpson was the U.S. Senator for Wyoming from 1978 to 1996. He was the Republican whip for 10 years chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1995 to 1997. He chaired the Immigration and Refugee Subcommittee of Judiciary; the Nuclear Regulation Subcommittee; the Social Security Subcommittee and the Committee on Aging. From 1997 to 2000, Simpson taught at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and served for two years as the Director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School.

Simpson now lives in Cody and practices law with his two lawyer sons William and Colin in the firm of Simpson, Kepler and Edwards. The three are also partners in the firm of Burg Simpson Eldrege Hersh and Jardine of Englewood, Colorado. Alan Simpson teaches periodically at his alma mater, the University of Wyoming at Laramie. He serves on the Commission for Continuity in Government and as co-chair of Americans for Campaign Reform with former Senate colleagues Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. Simpson is active with the National Commission on Writing, is on the Advisory Board of Common Good (a legal reform coalition), is a former member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, and was a member of the Iraq Study Group.