Fareed Zakaria

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Fareed Zakaria (born January 20, 1964, Mumbai, India) is a journalist, columnist, author, editor, commentator, and television host specializing in international relations and foreign affairs.

He was named Editor of Newsweek International in October 2000. He writes a weekly foreign affairs column for Newsweek, which appears fortnightly in the Washington Post. In 2003, his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (Norton) was published.

On television, Zakaria hosts the weekly Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria news show for PBS. Since 2002, he has been a regular member of the roundtable of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos and an analyst for ABC News.

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Views
4 Iraq War views
5 Participation in Wolfowitz meeting
6 Personal
7 Bibliography
8 Notes
9 External links

[edit] Early life

Zakaria was born in India to a practicing Muslim family. His father was former deputy leader of the Congress party and scholar Rafiq Zakaria, and his mother is Fatima Zakaria (former Sunday editor, Times of India). His brother Arshad is a former head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch.

Fareed and his brother attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, India. After graduating from the Anglican school, Zakaria attended Yale University where he became a member of the secret Scroll and Key Society and was part of Berkeley College. He was also President of the Yale Political Union, where he was a member of the Party of the Right. Zakaria later graduated with a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann.

[edit] Career

Before his current position with Newsweek, Zakaria was managing editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs, a journal of international politics and economics.

Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard University, where he taught international relations and political philosophy. He has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the webzine Slate. His 2002 essay for The New Yorker on America's global role has been widely quoted, as have several of his Newsweek cover-essays.

He is the author of the 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press), his PhD thesis, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His most recent book, The Future of Freedom, was published in the spring of 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller as well as a bestseller in several other countries. It has been translated into over eighteen languages.

In April 2005, Zakaria premiered as host of a new foreign affairs program on PBS, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.

Zakaria has won several awards for his Newsweek columns, including for his October 2001 Newsweek cover story, "Why They Hate Us". In 1999, he was named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" by Esquire. In 2005, he won the World Affairs Councils of America's International Journalist Award. In 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential graduates of Harvard University. He currently serves on the boards of Yale University, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, New America Foundation and Columbia University's International House.

[edit] Views

Zakaria is generally regarded as a political moderate or centrist^{[citation needed]}. In foreign policy terms, he is a "realist" (i.e. someone who believes that American foreign policy should be guided by a conception of its national interest). His first book, "From Wealth to Power", demonstrates how countries that grow rich and powerful inevitably expand their sphere of interests abroad. He sees America as a reluctant great power in the late 19th Century because it was a strange creature -- a strong nation with a very weak central state.

Zakaria is an advocate of free markets, both at home and abroad. He believes that America should embrace globalization and free trade. He is an internationalist, writing consistently in favor of American engagement with the world, multilateralism, and efforts to help alleviate global poverty and disease. He has often argued that helping countries to modernize their economies and societies is a more secure path to development and liberty than pushing for elections and democracy.

His second book, "The Future of Freedom", develops this latter theme more fully. In it, he argues that democracy works best in societies when it is preceded by "constitutional liberalism", which he defines as the rule of law, rights of property, contract, and individual freedoms. He has written that historically liberty has preceded democracy, not the other way around. He has argued that countries that simply hold elections without broad-based modernization -- including economic liberalization and the rule of law -- end up becoming "illiberal democracies". For this reason, he has been critical of the manner in which the Bush administration has pushed its democracy agenda forward, relying on elections in Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon as the solution to those countries problems and minimizing the building of the institutions of law, governance, and liberty.

After the 9/11 attacks, Zakaria wrote a seminal cover-story essay for Newsweek entitled "Why They Hate Us". In it, he argued that the Islamic terrorism has its roots in the stagnation and dysfunctions of the Arab world. Decades of failure under tyrannical regimes, all claiming to be Western-style secular modernizers, has produced an opposition that is religious, violent, and increasingly globalized. Because the Mosque is the one place where people can gather in an Arab country, that is where the opposition to these regimes grew. Because Islam was the one language that could not be censored, it became the language of opposition. He argued for a generational effort to create more open and dynamic societies in the Arab world, thereby helping "Islam enter the modern world."

[edit] Iraq War views

While Zakaria initially supported using military force against Iraq, he argued for a United Nations-sanctioned operation and occupation with a much larger force (approximately 400,000 troops). He wrote a Newsweek cover-essay the week the Iraq war began titled "The Arrogant Empire", which detailed the failures of the Bush foreign policy in the run-up to the war. He was an early and aggressive critic of the occupation, arguing against the disbanding of the army and the bureaucracy, which the administration accomplished under the guise of "Debaathification". He predicted that accelerating the buildup of the Iraqi military would create a Shia and Kurdish army that would exacerbate the sectarian tensions in the country. Four months into the occupation, his columns bore such titles as "Iraq Policy is broken", and in September of 2003 he wrote a cover story for Newsweek entitled "So What's Plan B?" In February of 2005, the week before Iraq's elections, he wrote "no matter how the voting turns out, the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim." In his October 2006 Newsweek cover essay, Zakaria called for a reduction in American troops in Iraq to 60,000 by end of 2007.

[edit] Participation in Wolfowitz meeting

In his 2006 book State of Denial, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward wrote that, on November 29, 2001, a meeting of Middle East experts and analysts was convened at the request of then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The outcome of the meeting was a report for President George W. Bush concerning American policy toward Afghanistan and the Middle East in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a report that supported the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Unusual for such a strategy session was the presence of journalists, including both Zakaria and Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly.

Zakaria told The New York Times that he attended the meeting but that he "thought it was a brainstorming session" and did not recall being told that a report for the President would be produced. According to the Times:

Mr. Kaplan said much of the meeting was spent drafting and reworking the document, on which Mr. Zakaria’s name did not appear, and was "a forceful summary of some of the best pro-war arguments at the time." Could any of the participants have been unaware there was a document in the making? "No, that’s not possible," he said.^[1]

On October 21, 2006, the Times published a correction that stated:

An article in Business Day on Oct. 9 about journalists who attended a secret meeting in November 2001 called by Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, referred incorrectly to the participation of Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a Newsweek columnist. Mr. Zakaria was not told that the meeting would produce a report for the Bush administration, nor did his name appear on the report.

Zakaria has been criticized for not disclosing his participation in the meeting.^[2]

[edit] Personal

He currently resides in New York City with his wife, Paula Throckmorton Zakaria, son Omar, and daughter Lila.

[edit] Bibliography

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Fareed Zakaria, (W.W. Norton & Company; 2003) ISBN 0-393-04764-4
From Wealth to Power, Fareed Zakaria, (Princeton University Press; 1998) ISBN 0-691-04496-1
The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World Essays from 75 Years of Foreign Affairs, edited by James F. Hoge and Fareed Zakaria, (Basic Books; 1997) ISBN 0-465-00170-X