Gilliard has a post up today aptly titled "Fuck Zakaria", and I feel that making a few more points about the excreble Mssr. Zakaria are in order.

Apparently Zakaria, as a columnist for Newsweek and a huge supporter of the invasion of Iraq was also a part of a group of folks known as "Bletchley II". Again these dimwitted fucks adopted something from WW Second to make themselves feel that they were part of something "real" in their international game of Risk and being double-naught spies.

Bletchley II was an ultra-secret group assembled by one the NeoCon True Believers of other NeoCon True Believers from various think tanks (well, mostly AEI) who provided "deep thoughts" about the rationale and methodology for convincing the country that we needed to go to war with Saddam. From "State of Denial":

The US government. especially the Pentagon, is incapable of producing the kind of ideas and strategy needed to deal with a crisis of the magnitude of 9/11, Wolfowitz told DeMuth*. He needed to reach outside to tackle the biggest questions. Who are the terrorists? Where did this come from? How does it relate to Islamic history, the history of the Middle East, and contemporary Middle East tension? What are we up against here?

Wolfowitz said he was thinking along the lines of Bletchley Park, the team of mathematicians and cryptologists the British set up during WWII to break the ULTRA German communications code. Could DeMuth quickly put together a skilled group to produce a report for the president, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and Tenet?
...
DeMuth recruited a dozen people. He later said they agreed to serve only "if I promised it would all be kept secret."

Included in the group were Bernard Lewis, a Cheney favorite and a scholar of Islam who had written extensively on Middle Eastern tensions with the West; Mark Palmer a former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary who specialized in dictatorships; Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International; Fouad Ajami, director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at SAIS; James Q. Wilson, a professor and specialist in human morality and crime; and Ruel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Middle East expert. Rumsfeld assigned his consultant and general fix-it man Steve Herbits, to participate. Herbits, who had devised the original idea and encouraged Wolfowitz to push it, called the group "Bletchley II."
...
"The general analysis was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable..."
...
"Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable. DeMuth said they had concluded that "Baathism is an Arab form of fascism transplanted to Iraq."
...
"We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. He was a gathering threat - the most menacing, active, and unavoidable threat. We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed." That was the only way to transform the region.

Copies of the memo, straight from the Neoconservative Playbook, were hand-delivered to the war cabinet members. In some cases, it was given a SECRET classification. Cheney was pleased with the memo, and it had a strong impact on President Bush, causing him to focus on the "malignancy" of the Middle East. Rice found it "very, very persuasive."
...
...Summarizing their conclusions, Herbits said, "We're facing a two-generation war. And start with Iraq."

Zakaria's latest tripe is pretty much deconstructed by Gilliards poster over at Gilliards blog. Suffice it to say that anything that Zakaria writes should be taken with not just a grain of salt, but a dump-truck load of salt. He's crossed the line once, in my opinion, between Journalist and Genocide Enabler by his rah-rah cheerleading of the war he helped rationalize. If he wants to play "think tank" twit, fine, but he should not be writing anything for Newsweek or any other publication without disclosing up front that he's responsible in no small way for the conclusions that led to the rationale for the fucking mistake that is Iraq.

*"State of Denial" pp 83-85