Students for Victory



	Joel Arends is the Executive Director of Vets for Freedom, and served in Iraq with the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division for their deployment to Iraq in 2004. Joel served as an infantry Platoon Leader in Baghdad and provided security for Iraqis as they went to the polls for the first free and fair elections held there in the last fifty years. He currently serves in the United States Army Reserve as a Captain. Joel holds the Bronze Star for his time in Iraq. He was recognized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as one of the fifty heroes in the Global War on Terror and has been profiled in Investor's Business Daily. He is an Iowa native and holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Dakota. He lives with his wife and two children in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

	David Bellavia is a former Army Staff Sergeant who served in the First Infantry Division (Task Force 2-2) and is the founder of Vets for Freedom. He has been recommended for the Medal of Honor for actions he took in a fierce urban firefight in the Battle of Fallujah. David and his platoon were the subject of a Time magazine cover story title, Into The Hot Zone. David has also been nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross, and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for valor, and the Conspicuous Service Cross. Recently he was invited to attend the President's State of the Union address as an honored guest. He has been inducted into the New York Veterans Hall of Fame. David returned to Iraq in June 2006 as an embedded reporter with the Iraqi Army. Bellavia's memoir of his time in Iraq, House to House, was released by Simon & Schuster in September 2007. He lives Western New York.

	Richard Carlson is Vice Chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. He has experience in journalism and diplomacy and is a former United States Ambassador to the Seychelles. For four years, Carlson was a member of the U.S. delegation to the annual US-USSR Information Talks in Moscow and Washington, D.C. During the same period, he led official U.S. government delegations to the People's Republic of China, to Georgia, USSR, and to Moldavia, USSR. He has been involved in negotiations on behalf of the U.S. government with many foreign governments, including those of China, Korea, the USSR, Germany, Costa Rica, Belize, Liberia, Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Morocco and Israel. Carlson was director of the Voice of America for the last six years of the Cold War, the longest running director-general in the 50-year history of VOA. Carlson was President and CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting for five years, and has has won more than a dozen journalistic prizes, including the George Foster Peabody award.

	Pete Hegseth served in Iraq with the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division for their deployment to Iraq from 2005-2006 and is the Chairman of Vets for Freedom. Pete served as an infantry Platoon Leader in Baghdad during the nationwide elections in October and December 2005, and as a Civil-Military Operations officer in Samarra. He also served in Guantanamo Bay for a year on a security mission with his National Guard unit and currently serves in the 1-69 Infantry, New York Army National Guard as a Captain. Pete holds the Bronze Star for his time in Iraq. He is a Minnesota native and graduate of Princeton University. He lives with his wife in New York City.

	Dr. Walid Phares is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies where he focuses on Middle East history and politics, global terrorist movements, democratization and human rights. Dr. Phares also leads the foundation's Future of Terrorism Project, which considers how the Jihadi-Islamist threat will mutate over time and what can be done to defend against new, more deadly strains of terrorism. A fluent English, French, and Arabic speaker, he is a frequent guest on Fox News Channel, CNN, the BCC, al-Jazeera, al Hurra, al-Arabiya, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CTV, Global TV, and hundreds of radio programs. Dr. Phares is an Adjunct Professor at National Defense University School for National Security Executive Education (SNSEE) and is the author of nine books on terrorism and the Middle East.