A beautiful mind

At a time when political discourse seems increasingly polarised, superficial and confrontational, Zakaria8217;s thoughtful analyses are original, carefully modulated, difficult to pigeonhole on the traditional ideological spectrum 8212; and accessible to open minds of all ages.

Zakaria was in Los Angeles recently to address students at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood as part of the school8217;s Brown Family Speaker Series. Through several sessions, the high school students8217; response was universally enthusiastic 8212; indeed rapt. Older, less impressionable minds have found themselves equally rivetted.

Zakaria doesn8217;t speak in sound bites or epithets, and it8217;s difficult, in the space allotted to a newspaper column, to capture either his thought processes or his ability to articulate his positions. But as Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, says, 8216;8216;Fareed has a clear sense of the issues and he can talk about them and write about them in a non-fussy, non-pedantic way.8217;8217;

Zakaria first came to national prominence three weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he wrote a 7,000-word cover story for Newsweek titled 8216;8216;The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?8217;8217; His answer: Islamic countries had imported elements of our culture 8212; 8216;8216;Cadillacs, Gulfstreams and McDonald8217;s8217;8217;8212; but they had found it far more 8216;8216;difficult and dangerous8217;8217; to import what he called 8216;8216;the inner stuffings of modern society 8212; a free market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law.8217;8217;

8216;8216;The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no free press, few pathways for dissent,8217;8217; he wrote. 8216;8216;As a result, the mosque turned into the place to discuss politics. If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.8217;8217;

That8217;s why, Zakaria says, 8216;8216;Islam became the language of political opposition. At first, most of the people who became terrorists tried to overturn their own regimes 8212; in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan. But it8217;s tough to do that under a dictatorship. The US, as a free, democratic society, is a much softer target.8217;8217;

8216;8216;Bin Laden8217;s genius,8217;8217; Zakaria says, 8216;8216;was that he said, 8216;Stop worrying about your own countries, and let8217;s attack the head of the snake 8212; the US 8212; because it supports all those regimes you dislike.8217;8217; Zakaria8217;s arguments have been widely quoted 8212; in part, no doubt, because he is a Muslim, 8216;8216;someone able to take readers inside these cultures and make what they did seem more understandable, without saying it was OK,8217;8217; as he puts it.

Whitaker says Zakaria8217;s Newsweek story 8216;8216;had more impact than any analytical piece I can remember8217;8217;8212; and that8217;s just what he was looking for when he hired Zakaria after reading a book review he8217;d written in the New Republic.

Zakaria was 18 when he came to the United States from India. He studied at Yale and went to graduate school at Harvard, but even though he8217;d had summer internships at various magazines, he never really thought of himself as a journalist.

8216;8216;I probably aspired to the role of public intellectual 8212; an academic and a writer of sorts,8217;8217; he says, 8216;8216;but I hadn8217;t thought about where that would be.8217;8217; Then, in his final semester at Harvard, he had lunch with a friend who suggested he apply for the job of editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He got the job and he was off and writing 8212; insightfully and provocatively.

When Zakaria and I had breakfast recently, I asked how he felt about some journalists8217; characterisation of him as a Reaganite conservative. He said that had been true when he was in college, 8216;8216;but the spectrum has shifted so much that I8217;m really a centrist. I8217;m generally in favour of low taxes, for example, but I don8217;t think a big tax cut now is a good idea.8217;8217; Similarly, while Zakaria strongly supports President Bush8217;s decision to attack Iraq, he8217;s used such phrases as 8216;8216;diplomatic hypocrisy8217;8217; and 8216;8216;disaster8217;8217; to describe the administration8217;s pre-war foreign policy, and he8217;s critical of the 8216;8216;carte blanche8217;8217; the government now has to monitor potential terrorist activity in the United States.

He also thinks Bush 8216;8216;has an allergy to the UN8217;8217; and is sacrificing US credibility by not allowing UN inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now.

In his book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Zakaria argues that in trying to export democracy to other countries, the US has often mistakenly equated democracy with free elections, whereas he thinks capitalism and order must come first.

8216;8216;After all,8217;8217; as he points out, 8216;8216;Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through free elections.8217;8217;

Capitalism, Zakaria says, 8216;8216;embodies the concept of individual property rights,8217;8217; and that requires the rule of law and judges to interpret the laws. He8217;s skeptical about the ability of a country with an oil-based economy to follow that paradigm.

8216;8216;If you have treasure in the ground, you don8217;t have to create those kinds of structures aboveground, so you don8217;t get political candidates who have to campaign on healthcare or tax cuts. With no real issues, you wind up electing thugs who just say, 8216;Trust us 8212; we8217;ll take care of you8217;.8217;8217;

As Thomas Hudnut, Harvard-Westlake8217;s headmaster, said after Zakaria8217;s presentation at a campus-wide assembly: 8216;8216;When was the last time you saw 850 kids sit so quiet for an hour that you could hear a pin drop? This shows what happens when you talk up to students, instead of talking down to them.8217;8217;

The same, I think, could be said of adult audiences. The success of screaming heads on television notwithstanding, I think Zakaria8217;s emergence demonstrates that there8217;s a genuine hunger in the American public for intelligent, articulate commentary on world events. If Bill O8217;Reilly, Chris Mathews and their loud-mouthed ilk would just shut up a few minutes, maybe we could hear it. 8212; LAT-WP

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