Meghan O'Sullivan

to serve with Ambassador Crocker, to help the Iraqis – and to help the Embassy help the Iraqis – meet the benchmarks that the Congress and the President expect to get passed.

She has also acted as an advisor to Mitt Romney. In 2013, O'Sullivan was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case. During 2013, she acted as Vice-Chair to Richard Haass at talks between the political parties in Northern Ireland.

O'Sullivan is also a One Young World Counsellor, speaking about "Peace & Conflict Resolution to a group of 1,300 young people in Dublin, Ireland in 2013. O'Sullivan is currently the Chairwoman of the North American branch of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission.

On May 31, 2007, President Bush announced that O'Sullivan was returning to Baghdad:

With Stephen Hadley, she is also credited as being one of the original advocates in the White House of the 2007 "surge" strategy. On September 15, 2007, she left the White House and began teaching at Harvard.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, she volunteered for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance under Jay Garner. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Jay Garner that he could not keep her (or Tom Warrick) on in Iraq, though Rumsfeld later relented. She was an assistant to Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority. She was Senior Director for Iraq at the United States National Security Council. O'Sullivan's last position at the White House was as the Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan where she frequently communicated via telephone with Fort Leavenworth's General David Petraeus on a new military strategy for Iraq.

She received her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in 1991. O'Sullivan later received her master's degree in economics and her D.Phil. in politics from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral dissertation was about the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan (born September 13, 1969) is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. She is Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School. She is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, where she was previously an adjunct senior fellow, and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission.