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Fareed Zakaria

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74
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2016-10-06
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2016-10-06
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  1. “And for all those reasons I think that I thought, you know what, maybe this will be a way to put a break or to get to this problem of radical Islam. I pretty quickly realized about two or three weeks into the invasion that it was going disastrously, largely because the Bush administration decided not just to go into Iraq, but then to within three weeks dismantle the entire Iraqi state. They disbanded the army, they disbanded the Bathist bureaucracy, the Sunni bureaucracy, they fired all school teachers, and I started writing pretty critical stuff. But that's no excuse. I mean, I think I made a big mistake, and I probably look at it as the single biggest mistake I made in my life.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “American foreign policy that was not because of Israel, it was because of the deeply dysfunctional nature, the broken politics of the Arab world that had had forty, fifty years of dictatorships, that had allowed enormous stagnation in their societies, and that underneath had all these kind of pathologies had been growing and bubbling up. And it made me think, you know what, maybe there's a Hail Mary here, that you go into Iraq, you create a functioning democracy. It was one of the most literate societies in the Arab world. It was one of the centers of civilization. One-third of Baghdad was Jewish in 1910, which I've always heard is a sign of how civilized a society can be, that can they accept and assimilate people like the Jews.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “News weekend living in New York. Living in New York, it was my hometown. And, you know, I think that immigrants in some way come to America for safety, for security, for this sense of building a new life and to feel like these pathologies of the old world had sort of found me and found America. I was shocked. I was horrified. I was angry. Some part of it was, I think, that I wanted to be sure not to be excusing as a Muslim radical Islam, the forces that produce this barbarism, and I didn't want to seem soft on them. I'm now looking back in retrospect and trying to psychoanalyze how I was thinking. And some part of it was that I realized just how deep the pathology of radical Islam was. I realized that it had, this was the whole point of the article, that it was not a product of”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Discuss So, I was skeptical about the intervention in Kosovo. I was skeptical about the intervention in Bosnia. I was for limited versions of it. And then 9-11 happens in Iraq. And you're absolutely right. So at one level, what I want to say in all honesty is I temporarily took leave of my senses because it really was something contrary to the realist tradition that I had kind of admired and followed for most of my life. Here's what I think happened. Two things. One, I did get very rattled by 9-11. I think maybe as an immigrant, maybe I just thought, my God, you know, this is something that the idea that this could happen in America. But now you're an immigrant.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Precisely. I mean, part of it was having grown up in a third world country that had been a subject of British colonialism for 150 years was to recognize this stuff has to grow organically in these societies. It's very hard to make it happen to impose it. What happens is you squander a lot of your resources in that quest.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And people wanted to understand what was happening. So my views on foreign policy in general, I would describe as more realist than neocon. I was always tough. I always felt like the left was too soft on the Soviets. And in that sense, I shared something with the neocons. But I never was a big guy who believed in democracy promotion around the world. In fact, some of the most prominent neocons like Bill Crystal and Bob Kagan had routinely attacked me through the nineties, for having this more limited view of particularly military power.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “People need to understand what is going on here. Why are they, why is this happening? He said, why don't you just write a essay that explains it? I said it would have to be very historical. It would be a kind of current affairsy thing. He said, just write what you think we need to read. And in three days, I wrote a 7,000 word article called Why They Hate Us. And I think it's fair to say that put me on the map. Yeah, for sure. You know, I did that week. I think I did meet the press, the John Stewart Show, Charlie Rose. And it became, it was one of the most widely sold magazine covers in Newsweek's history.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, you know, before 9-11, I had been writing on foreign policy for a long time. I'd been writing about foreign policy, my dissertation was on American foreign policy between the Civil War and Theodore Roosevelt's administration. I was really interested in this stuff. I wrote a little bit about the Middle East, not a lot, but then 9-11 happens, and all of a sudden there's this huge demand for understanding radical Islam and understanding the Middle East. And in a weird way, I knew this stuff. I'd grown up with it. My dad was a Muslim politician in India. He actually had a PhD as well, and he was deeply learned about these forces, had always been very worried about radical Islam. So I knew this stuff in my bones. And so three weeks after 9-11, the editor of Newsweek at the time, Mark Whitaker asked me, he said, you know,”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I mean, you know, feed her school to the administration I think it's more that academia has changed it's become more technical and narrow i've talked to larry summers about this larry for example feels that economists today study things what gets them tenure is so obscure and narrow that it couldn't actually inform public policy very much there are some exceptions but i think that's true henry kissinger for example got tenure at harvard essentially through the kind of articles and essays that were published in foreign affairs, you know, big public policy essays. Today what gets you tenure is these very narrow, it's sort of like you have to have an instinct for the capillary rather than the jugular. And it's a tragedy because you think about the world we're in. I mean, what's going on in terms of the Middle East?”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's on the brochure. And it's true. I loved being an undergrad, but graduate school at Harvard, you really felt the intellectual ferment and the sense that people were connected to the world. You had people who were in and out of administrations. You had people who were just operating at a very heady level. It was a lot of fun. I think it's changed a bit because academia has become more professionalized. The academics now are people who are really academics, almost going into government would be seen as a betrayal. But in those days, there was still...”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Figure out what they want Exactly, exactly. You know, the Harvard is an amazing place. It really is in many ways a kind of the center of intellectual life. People come from all over.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I'll tell you honestly what happened is I was at Yale I just had the greatest time at Yale I studied whatever I wanted I had no idea what I was going to do started out doing a bunch of science then ended up doing history and I fell in love with America and I wanted to stay but I didn't want to go to law school because I didn't think I didn't want to be a lawyer so I thought to myself well if I get a PhD I can stay for a long time because I was on a student visa so I applied for PhD programs largely because I figured this gets me another five or six years in America and then I can figure out what I want to do and so I applied to Harvard and got in there and I had to do all of this. Yale and Harvard all on scholarships because again my parents were middle class but by American standards their total family income was well less than one year's tuition.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Deputy Treasury Secretary. No, the story I can tell is I managed to get, so there were four parties at Yale. Party of the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the Independent Party. I actually was in those days a pretty right-wing. And so I was from the Party of the Right. I managed to get elected with the endorsements of all four parties. The last time that had happened was when Edwin Meese ran for president of the Yale Political Union in 1954. Meese, of course, then became one of Ronald Reagan's closest states and was Attorney General, somebody who also was a very prominent Yale political union president was John Kerry in the early 60s.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Be paranoid. But anyway, go ahead. I got very active at Yale politically. And I loved it. I revived the Yale political union, if I can boast. It had about 150 members when I think I took it over and it had 900 by the time I finished.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, in a way we became friends. It took a while because his famous paranoia is really true, which is that for a while he thought that I was against him. And I discovered this years later Because Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Kissinger, which is basically quite favorable, but of course, you know, like Kissinger, if it's not written by your mother, it's not favorable enough. On page 1200 of a biography, he claims never to have read. In the acknowledgements page, it says that I was one of the three people who read it in draft. So he assumed that I was in cahoots with Isaacson. But anyway, back to Yale. So you could come.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, I sometimes think I was just No, I was a nerd. But that for me, therefore, Yale was like a homecoming. In India, everyone wanted to be an engineer and a doctor. And then I came to Yale and my God, there were other people who were fascinated by the relationship between Henry Kissinger and Golda Maeir. So I found it like a homecoming Kissinger.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “of the Nobel Prizes were one for work that people had done before they were forty years old. Because, you know, that's when you take risks, that's when you defy authority, that's when you do the kind of stuff you need to.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, I think that one of the things people don't realize is it's very hard for rich countries to continue to have drive, continue to have the kind of pulsating energy that it takes to continue to grow. Because you become rich. I mean, for all of us who are comfortable, we see this with our children. You can't fake it. You can't pretend that you're impoverished when you're not. The reason I think America has been able to stay so successful for so long is it gets this massive infusion of energy from people who are determined and smart, but above all who are hungry. I mean, they were coming to America because they're hungry and they're young often because those are the people who are willing to take that risk. I remember seeing somewhere that a statistic that the Nobel Prizes in science, 90%”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Through a pretty awful period. The economy was terrible, inflation was 40, 50 percent, there were two years of martial law. I remember looking at a statistic once, the IITs, the Indian Technical Institutes, graduated about 2,500 people a year. In the year I came to America, and I didn't go to those institutes, but the year I came to America, 1981, 82 of the 2,500 graduates of the IITs that year, 95% ended up in America five years later.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh gosh, that's a great question and obviously haunted me. Initially, of course, I thought I was going to come back. And a few things happened. Probably the dominant thing is I just fell in love with America and I fell in love with the opportunities here, to be totally honest. And it just seemed as though the canvas was so much larger, it seemed so, it really seemed as though you could do whatever you wanted. You could be yourself. There was just so much more freedom. Part of it, I do think, is probably that growing up in India I was always my father's son. Every grade I was in, one of the teachers or two of the teachers would have opinions about me based on who my dad was. And maybe I thought I would never be able to be myself. I don't know. You know, when I look at it objectively, India in the seventies was going.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Feeling like that urban India was sort of like a different country, you know, being in Bombay and living in a nice house with cars and servants, that was a whole different world.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “very much, you know, because my father was we grew up middle class in Bombay, and I don't mean middle class as a euphemism. What I mean is we were clearly not rich in that both my parents had salaries, we were very comfortable, we were very well connected because my parents being given their jobs, they kind of knew lots of people. But I knew that if I broke a toy, that was it. If I lost a book, that was it. I couldn't replace those. But my dad's constituency was a rural constituency. There were a thousand villages in it. And I would go campaigning with him sometimes. And I remember distinctly that sense of complete shock at how people lived. People in rural India in the 1970s were basically living medieval lives. They were living lives that were not that different from what it must have looked like in the 16th or 17th century. And that was, I remember that being a shock. And I always remember”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Goes into politics and spends most of his life in politics. My mom was a journalist and I grew up in a very political household and I grew up at a time when I don't do this with my kids, but I kind of grew up in my parents' movie, if you know what I mean. They were wonderful parents. My mom was incredibly devoted. But I remember being nine years old and going to a conference, my dad was at the time tourism minister. I went to a conference on how to get more tourists to come to India. I spent four days. Isn't that how nine-year-olds want to spend their time? Exactly. I can still remember some of the speeches. So I had a very intense education in that way at a very young age.”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Sure, I grew up in India my dad was a politician and my mother was a journalist so I sometimes feel as though I've kind of ended up somewhere in between those two worlds. My father was sort of after Indian independence there was the generation everybody knows about Gandhi and Nehru and people like that. My dad was the next generation very idealistic determined to fight against British rule comes to college comes back he goes to gets a scholarship to go to London actually voted in the election of 1945 which if you remember was the Athley Churchill election because British subjects if they were in England were in that time allowed to vote. It becomes basically the DA of Bombay and then”

    2016-10-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 85 - Fareed Zakaria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source