Rating: - The Impact of Ignorance
Ron Suskind's The Way of the World is a great book to read while we wait for a new president to take office. Suskind had excellent sources in the Bush Administration, but it's his ability to set the information he receives into cultural reality that makes his work extraordinary. In this book, particularly, he is able to show how policy was made in the intellectual vacuum of the White House and how it impacted the lives of individuals whose stories Suskind tells in careful detail.

It was those stories--the Pakistani student shown compassion at Connecticut College on 9/11, the Colorado family who takes in a Muslim student and then must kick him out, the rural Pennsylvania family that has better luck with the student, the lawyer who takes on a prisoner at Guantanamo, the disillusioned intelligence insider who makes finding black market nuclear fuel his mission, among others--that kept me reading. His account of Benazir Bhutto's last days broke my heart.

Yes, Suskind outs the Bush administration for creating whole cloth a letter to make the link between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and Iraq, but it's the process by which the letter was created and Suskind's account of all the opportunities Bush & Co. ignored to avoid war that I found most chilling.

The subtitle, A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, captures Suskind's point that we must not lose sight of the values--the rule of law, the worth of the individual, the importance of reason, the power of education--that make our country great. I read a book (rather than a newspaper or a blog) for the kind of tapestry that an accomplished writer like Suskind can weave of myriad facts and experiences. The sum is indeed greater than the parts.

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Rating: - What Moral Authority?
No need to cover points already made by others. There's one underlying assumption of the book I want to take issue with. Repeatedly, author Suskind alludes to America's lost moral authority, which he sees as a principal casualty of the Bush administration's cynical war on terrorism. Now, I'm wondering just where that lost moral authority resides or has resided. Seems to me that an unbiased reading of the country's history provides little evidence of any repository of moral authority that could be lost. From genocide of the Native Americans to ruthless territorial expansion to WWII fire bombings, plus the many recent bloody imperial adventures, the list of major crimes is a long one. In short, looks to me like we've acted pretty much like any other expansionist state since our founding. By what actions, then, can our historical narrative have accumulated the kind of moral authority that in Suskind's opinion could be lost. Nowhere, I believe, does he take up this key question.

Sure, the Bush regime has been particularly brazen in waging aggression abroad and assaulting civil liberties at home. Nonetheless, these are not unprecedented violations, as any unexpurgated account of international and domestic law reveals. In fact, torture has been routinely practiced from the Indian wars to McKinley's Phillipines to Johnson's Vietnam. But instead of concealing these deceptions, as in the past, this hubristic administration redefines the prohibitions and institutionalizes them at Gitmo. And I'm willing to bet that had Iraq not gone so badly sour, such violations would be popularly overlooked.

This doesn't mean that energized people shouldn't terminate as many of the abuses as possible. But, Americans need to be clear that in dealing with our government, we're also dealing with an empire, and empires are not managed on the basis of doing what's morally right. Such practices as torture, domestic spying, and rights violations will continue underground, just as before, not because government is evil, but because the imperial dynamic requires foul means as well as fair. Reforms can change the above-ground and give liberals something to brag about. But that's as much as good people such as the book's Candace Gorman can hope to accomplish when dealing with empire.

Perhaps there is hope that a very real moral energy can be mobilized at some point around common human problems, as Suskind desires. But what's sorely missing in the international equation is a common vision that would rally those hopes, the sort of alternative social order that might well borrow from the best of America but not seek to duplicte it. And it's that vision that should be sought after, not restoring some illusory moral authority that no empire has ever possessed in the first place.

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Rating: - Thank you
Got the book in a few days, and it was in a good condition! Thanks!

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Rating: - Individual perspectives amidst geopolitical issues
This insightful book melds individual stories of "east and west" and the urgent geopolitical issues we face today. An amazingly good read.

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Rating: - great book
The book is a must read if you want to understand the assault on the constitution during the Bush administration.