KEY POINTS:
This racy book tracks the experiences in the United States during the Bush-Cheney years of an Afghan teenage exchange student, a young Pakistani businessman in Washington DC, a compassionate lawyer acting for a sick prisoner in Guantanamo, a former US Ambassador to Pakistan and assorted British and American
intelligence operatives.
The subtitle is A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. So why did it leave me pessimistic and despondent? Well, the thesis is even the spies think that the United States needs to regain the moral high ground and that there is a new mood to make that climb.
Two obstacles exist. One is the assumption that American values are supreme and have only lately been subverted by the lying and cheating of the Bush administration - deceits, by the way, that the author even has the former head of British intelligence confirm.
Whereas, for example, Kissinger, the man who helped General Pinochet gain power in Chile and continued to support him during the killing years, is still a foreign affairs adviser to people the author thinks are the good guys.
The second problem is that America continues to have serious ideological blocks, even among those who have abandoned the Bush administration. The First Amendment may guarantee free speech but let any politician declare himself to be a "liberal" or an "atheist", or suggest that America needs to examine its so-called, imprecise "values", or claim that overt, flag- swaddling patriotism is just another form of dangerous, cheap nationalism and watch him or her quickly shut out of the national debate. And yet a proudly anti-intellectual creationist is running for Vice-President.
This national ambience has been the major triumph of the religious right. Then the author divides his cast into good guys and bad guys, and yet some of the good guys who are most critical of the recent activities of the Government have sometimes, in their own ways, been passively complicit in what has gone on. One thing he does admit is that British intelligence operatives are more politically independent and effective than their equivalent Americans.
At the University of Iowa a few years ago, I heard Thomas Friedman, the top New York Times foreign affairs columnist, repeatedly refer in a speech to the death in war of civilians as "collateral damage". Likewise, Suskind's tame acceptance of the language of the US Defence Department he otherwise reviles leads him to repeatedly refer to "defence contractors", thus affording them moral relief from their real designation, which is mercenaries.
I know there are millions of intelligent liberals in the US, oppressed though they may be at present by the aggression of ideologues. And we have so much to thank them for as a nation over the past century; so to be categorically anti-American is foolish; they embrace so much goodness and decency. But will they ever learn to look outwards and understand that they do not have a mortgage on freedom and democracy, that many other countries have decent ethical values they are proud of?
Suskind is the kind of writer who carries you along on a tide of fast prose. His plotting - and although this is non-fiction it is intricately woven - is expert and holds the reader as a crime thriller might. It is a satisfying book because it carries so much information and I would have to concede that though truth and hope are rare commodities during election campaigns, we should try hard to keep hope alive or all else disappears.
The Way of the World
By Ron Suskind (Simon & Schuster $38)
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
