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The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

Harper 415 pages; $27.95 'When things really work," Benazir Bhutto proclaimed 11 days before her death, it's because politicians, religious leaders and their followers, husbands, wives and children pull together to save each other-and themselves. "It's the way of the world." According to Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, this path to human salvation reflects the core values of the United States. At its best, as with the Marshall Plan, America does the right thing, cares what others think and asks for nothing in return. If given the chance, Suskind believes, democratic universalism will prevail over terror networks and authoritarian ideologies. In The Way of the World, Suskind maintains that these principles remain alive with the American people "as a troubled, and troubling decade nears its end." But, he argues, as he did in The One Percent Doctrine (2006), the Bush administration threw away the moral compass following the attacks on September 11, 2001. Suskind presents new evidence, "the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings," that the president and vice president knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before they made war on Iraq. Little wonder, then, that the US is now viewed around the world as a might-makes-right bully, accountable to no one, not even its own people. In a sometimes kaleidoscopic narrative, Suskind follows several representative characters as they search for saving truths in an increasingly cruel and chaotic world. His protagonists include Usman Khosa, a 20-something Pakistani emigre, detained for questioning by the authorities while on his way to work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC; Mohammed Ibrahim Frotan, a teenage exchange student from Afghanistan, assigned to a home in Denver, Colorado; Candace Gorman, a civil rights attorney, representing Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a baker in Afghanistan, who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay since 2002; Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the nuclear proliferation expert at the CIA and Department of Energy; and Bhutto, who, Suskind suggests, had evolved from corrupt prime minister to democrat-in-the-making and begun to wade "into the crowds, buying them oranges and holding babies-letting herself bleed into them, and them into her." Suskind's faith in the power of person-to-person contact is touching-and a bit naive. Usman's heated exchange with his sister, an Islamic fundamentalist, he writes, ended with an agreement to explore