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

Review “Complex, ambitious, provocative, risky…. In a crowded, highly talented field, Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration.” — The New York Times “Suskind is a brilliant reporter and his investigation into the post-9/11, pre-Iraq war period makes you think you’re reading about it for the first time…. Give this man another Pulitzer Prize.” — Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast “Extraordinary…. If Suskind is correct, laws have been broken and President George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney are implicated…. This is — or ought to be — a Watergate-sized scandal.” — Financial Times About the Author Ron Suskind is the author of The Globe and Mail and New York Times bestsellers The One Percent Doctrine, The Price of Loyalty, and A Hope in the Unseen. From 1993 to 2000 he was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. He currently writes for various national magazines, including The New York Times Magazine and Esquire. Suskind lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy Suskind, and their two sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Welcome Home Usman Khosa awakes to the voices of his roommates in the kitchen. A hazy sun is shining in, giving the exposed brick above his bed an orange hue. He checks his night-table clock – 7:15 – and slips back into the deep sleep of a young man. It is morning in America. Or at least in an apartment near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., where three young, well-educated men start a summer’s day. They are friends, a few years out of Connecticut College, dancing through the anxious glories of first jobs and few obligations. It’s a guy’s world. Linas, a strapping Catholic, American-born, with Midwestern roots, is an economic analyst; David, Jewish and gay, with wavy brown hair and movie-idol looks, is a public relations staffer for an international aid organization. After breakfast, they slip out together, each in a blazer and khakis, Christian and Jew, straight and gay, into the flow of the capital’s professional class. Their Muslim roommate hears the front door shut and rises with a sense of well-being. He’d worked late, as usual, and then met some friends for dinner, a night that went late with loud talk and drink. He came south to D.C. from Connecticut just over three years ago, a day after receiving his diploma with its summa cum laude seal, to a waiting desk at an international economic consulting firm, Barnes Richardson, with offices across the street from the U.S. Treasury Department and a block from the White House. He finds the work fascinating because it is: taking sides in bloodless struggles between countries and their major corporations over product dumping and tariffs. Trade wars. It’s the kind of conflict that smart folks thought the world was moving toward in the mercantile 1990s, when the Soviet Union’s fall was to usher in a post-ideological age, a period when aggression would be expressed, say, with tariffs on imported cars and wheat dumping. It was a hopeful notion that issues of progress and grievance, the fortunes of haves and have-nots, would be fought on an economic field where the score could be kept in terms of GDP, per capita income, and infant mortality rates. It wouldn’t turn out that way, as the few who saw the rise of religious extremism foretold. And that’s why the boy brushing his teeth this particular morning – July 27, 2006 – is not just any young professional on the make. He is, notably, a Muslim from the fault line country of Pakistan – the home, at present, of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Pervez Musharraf and Mullah Omar, fifty-five nuclear weapons and countless angry bands of Islamic radicals. Usman, from this place, of this place, strives with an ardent, white-hot yearning to be accepted into America’s current firmament of fading h