The Way of the World Read online

  Usman, like immigrants before him, is a walker. It’s something about the crowd, its intimacy and anonymity, and the way you can flow inside of it. It draws him in. Any trip of a few miles or less he takes on foot. He keeps business suits and sport jackets in the closet at work, or at the dry cleaners near his office. So each day of summer he slips into shorts, Nikes, and a T-shirt and squeezes his laptop into a backpack.

  It is a warm day, but not nearly as warm as Lahore, he thinks, stepping outside. Oh yes, Lahore is much hotter than this, and dusty. Washington, even at its most humid, feels temperate and superior, lovely and fresh, and seems to wash ancient grit from his pores. He stops on the top stoop, spins his iPod to a play loop of Arabic tunes, and sets forth for Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “THANK YOU, THAT’S FINE FOR TODAY,” George W. Bush says, as he dismisses a half-dozen attendees of his morning intelligence briefing and settles behind the world’s most famous desk. He’s agitated, doing his best to get things in order before he leaves for his annual August vacation in a week. But the world won’t heed his will, not anymore. The Oval Office is quiet—an unscheduled half hour—and a precious moment to step back, to take stock. His best-laid plans for this summer are already in tatters. It was to be a season to focus on his strengths, with the midterm elections just over three months away. That meant domestic issues, where he has capital with a reasonably strong economy, and events highlighting his one remaining area of strength in the foreign arena: handling terrorists.

  Except everything, and everyone, has been conspiring against him. His poll numbers are in the basement, with several mid-July tallies putting his approval rating at just 40 percent, the lowest for any modern president going into the midterms. Casualties in Iraq have been steadily rising since the spring—the country is all but exploding in sectarian violence. Karl Rove and Condi Rice are talking about shifting the rhetoric on Iraq away from the value of America’s eventual triumph to the unthinkable dangers that would attend America’s withdrawal. He spent yesterday, July 26, with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Malaki, who gave a speech to Congress that the White House staff worked and reworked until it screamed. The consensus sentiment in the morning’s papers is that al-Malaki gave a campaign speech that was completely divorced from reality.

  If people want depressing reality, there’s plenty of that to go around. Israel is sinking deeper each day into a disastrous engagement, now two weeks along, with a stronger-than-expected Hezbollah. It’s a mess. The morning’s reports from the region show the worst day of Israeli losses yet—9 dead—and ever worsening PR blowback from two weeks of “unintended” casualties, now at 489 Lebanese civilians. Meanwhile, only 20 Hezbollah fighters have perished. And, two days ago, 4 United Nations workers died when a clearly marked UN outpost was hit by Israeli bombers. Reports have emerged of the humanitarian workers madly radioing Maydays to the Israeli army in their last moments.

  Bush talked this morning at 7:30 to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, about all this. The unified front on Israel and Hezbollah they both helped craft at the G8 meeting last week in Russia is in tatters. Yesterday Rice was in Rome, where representatives from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East met to try to hammer out a cease-fire. But the terms were untenable, and Bush, talking to Rice, opposed it. He was instantly pilloried for that in last night’s news cycles, and all the G8 partners—everyone except the Brits—are distancing themselves. So when he talked to Merkel, he told her no one is saying that aggression is the first choice, not for the Americans in Iraq or the Israelis in Lebanon. But it must be an option. In his first National Security Council meeting as president he tried to set the tone, telling all the NSC principals his view that “sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.” Couldn’t have been much clearer than that. Said it again this morning to Merkel, and still believed it, more strongly than ever. Merkel at least understood this position. She wasn’t like her predecessor, Gerhardt Schroeder, who opposed the United States on Iraq and didn’t seem to think force was ever justified. No, Merkel understood. She’d said so on the phone—their second call this week—and that she would make statements in the coming days in support of the United States and Israel. Some things were worth fighting for.

  But what’s really driving Bush’s calculations at the moment is the just-finished intelligence briefing. It involved a plot that he’s been hearing about for some time. The British have been working it since last year: a major terror cell in the suburbs of London. While it’s their case—they’ve made that very clear—U.S. involvement has deepened as the tentacles of the cell have spread across Britain to Pakistan. With about forty suspects, sending plenty of e-mails and making calls, the Brits have increasingly had to rely on what Bush likes to call the “firepower of Ft. Meade,” the massive National Security Agency surveillance complex in the Maryland hills.

  Then, in the past few days, everything changed. Electronic surveillance revealed, finally, the nature of the plot: airliners taking off from Heathrow carrying explosives and headed for the U.S. East Coast. Talk among the suspects revealed it could involve as many as a dozen planes blowing up over U.S. cities. That would make it the biggest plot since 9/11—the so-called second wave that Bush and Cheney have been waiting for all these years. Reports of all kinds have been coming to Bush’s desk as the U.S. anti-terror machine has secretly ratcheted up. Mike Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, is working his intelligence unit around the clock; NSA’s working overtime; and CIA is doing what it can, especially with its sources in Pakistan.

  This morning’s briefers said that the British are advising the United States to sit back and take a deep breath. The Brits have been stressing that this might be just early logistical talk, that they have these suspects so completely wired that they can’t sneeze without generating an electronic dispatch, and that no one is doing anything that would pass for an active operation. Bush has heard this before. Patience, patience. The British are saying that all the time; and that they’re better at intelligence work than the United States—they’ve been doing it longer, they have experience with the IRA’s terror network, and they’re especially well placed in target communities, such as the Pakistanis and the Saudis. The United States, with all its electronic firepower, is having more and more trouble in recent years with the basic spy craft of recruiting spies and getting actionable information from walk-in informants. The big breaks, of course, have come from sources on the inside or nearby, sources that took time to develop, and from informants in communities close to the action. The United States is too anxious and trigger-happy, the Brits complain, taken to picking up some bit of an overheard conversation and then sweeping up suspects. Blair said in a recent conversation with Bush that this was “the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need.”

  The Brits, after their experience in Northern Ireland, were starting to believe that the key was to treat this not as a titanic ideological struggle, but rather as a law enforcement issue. This required being patient enough to get the actual evidence—usually once a plot had matured—with which to build a viable case in open court.

  But waiting didn’t feel right to Bush, not now. It could take six months or more—who knew?—until this plot became operational. Blair was flying to Washington late tonight. They had a full morning planned for tomorrow, a long meeting and then a joint press conference. Blair was a good man, and they’d covered for each other plenty of times. Blair would come through.

  Bush looks up at the Tiffany grandfather clock in the far corner. Ten past nine. He has to leave for a bill-signing ceremony on the South Lawn in five minutes, then he meets the Romanian prime minister, in town for a visit, then they’ll do a press conference together, then lunch, and then he has an economic speech to give in front of the National Association of Manufacturers. He flips absently through a briefing book with some talking points for the day and forces himself to focus. For him, it’s always been a struggle
between the analytical and the emotive—the former, an effort; the latter, so natural, so clarifying. His feelings, his hunches, have gotten him and his nation into some tight spots. He’s aware of that. So he’s tried to be more attentive lately, tried to read the briefing books—to study them, with their seasoned, prudent, boring-as-hell advice.

  What no one understands, no one but Cheney, is how hard some days are. People are not bending to his rightful desires as they used to. He remembers what it felt like, in the two or three years after 9/11, to possess native authority, and he misses it.

  But in this one area—the secret world of intelligence, of foiling terrorists and their plots—he still has control. Everything unfolds in shadows. The results are what he says they are. Now that they have the terrorists on tape saying their plot is directed at America, he wants it shut down, ASAP. This is what he, and his Republican Party, gets paid for—protecting America—something the voters might benefit from being reminded of. What could be more important?

  Through the leaded glass windows of the Oval Office, a limousine and four black SUVs idle in the driveway near the portico—Cheney is gearing up to deliver a speech at the Korean War memorial on the Mall. The July sun is burning off a morning mist. It’s going to be a hot one. Bush puts on his suit jacket, ready for his day, as the motorcade roars toward the gates.

  USMAN KHOSA IS WALKING EAST along the White House’s ornate wrought-iron fence, tapping it with his hand, like one might tap a white picket fence. A U.S. Park policeman moves toward him. The officer is saying something. Usman can see his lips move, shouting. He pulls out his earplugs. Arab music blares. “Cars will be passing out of this gate. You need to stop!” Usman nods, apologizes, and fusses with his iPod as other walkers back up behind him. The gates slowly begin to open. He looks up at the majestic building—he loves looking at it. He takes a route each morning down Sixteenth Street, where the White House is visible from a mile away and grows larger with each passing block. It makes him feel consequential to walk toward it, like he’s going to meet Bush, or could, and often thinks about what that’d be like. Bush is the most known person in the world—his presence, his face, has become the face of America; his pointing finger, punching the air, an emblem of the way the United States engages with the world. Usman feels he knows the man and that, as a Muslim and a lover of America and someone who often finds himself reluctantly defending Bush to invective-spewing Pakistanis, he and Bush might actually have a worthwhile conversation.

  He’s more right about this than he realizes. Though Bush represents America electorally, his life is as unrepresentative as it could be, a cocoon of rare luxuries and sycophants, a carefully crafted, busy, filtered array of activity, much like the lives of those sitting atop so many venerable institutional mountains, only more so. But those snowcapped peaks are, in the modern age, melting—the range itself, crumbling—under pressure from the shifting, heated, quaking landscape of the individual. The information age, after all, is the age of the individual, a time when great waves of personal choice and expression—magnetic fields of impulse, connected on a borderless, global grid—can level the assembled power of armies and nations. The now common term asymmetric suggests that the comfortable symmetries, strategies, and conversations between those on the mountaintops are increasingly inconsequential as power shifts from the peak to the base, not only to petulant, entrepreneurial “rogue states” but also all the way to the bottom, to those—many among the multitude—who are representative in their experiences, their sensations and swift judgments. They move in vast heartbeat migrations, both sensing nascent currents—anger, fear, hope, rage—and creating them in a kind of dizzying simultaneity, open-source and dynamic, that overwhelms institutional norms of fact gathering and review and analysis. It is on this landscape—no less startling for now being familiar—that a president laments that he gets better, more immediate intelligence from CNN than CIA; where some religious purist who posts a beheading video—downloaded endlessly, driving news cycles—is the black-sheep cousin to a college-dropout-cumbillionaire who creates Facebook.com; where two guys in a cave confound the message and might of the world’s most powerful nation; and a few ardent twentysomethings, with modest, acquirable skills and stolen credit cards, could assemble a device that wipes out Mid-town Manhattan.

  Usman Khosa, as a young Muslim man in search of a better life, busily ingesting the widely available fare of modernity’s mishmash, is representative in ways that are particularly consequential at this moment in history. Like it or not, he—and countless others like him—is in a discussion with the isolated man memorizing “talking points” in an oval office 164 yards away.

  And, in present tense, the ornate gates are now open. The limo and security SUVs speed out of the delicately cobblestoned roadway between the White House and the U.S. Treasury Department. Usman and a dozen people who’ve gathered in the past minute watch them pass and attempt a futile glimpse though tinted glass. Usman fiddles with his iPod as the gates close and begins to walk among the crowd toward Treasury.

  Right in front of the statue of Alexander Hamilton, at the base of a long sweep of steps leading to Treasury’s neoclassical pillars, he thinks he sees a flash of white out of his left eye. A bicycle is being flung. He turns as a large uniformed man lunges at him.

  “The backpack!” the man yells, pushing Usman against the Italianate gates in front of Treasury and ripping off his backpack. Another officer on a bicycle arrives from somewhere and tears the backpack open, dumping its contents on the sidewalk.

  Usman is in a daze, spread-eagle, grabbing cool iron. “What? What!”

  “Don’t move!”

  Pedestrians start madly dispersing, sprinting in crouches, hands over ears, running for cover.

  Usman is mortified, breathless. He can’t speak for a minute, maybe longer, as his bag is repeatedly searched and he’s roughly patted down once, then again.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” he croaks.

  The Secret Service officers look at him, unflinching. One talks into his walkie-talkie, calling for backup.

  “Are you a U.S. citizen?”

  “Do you have any weapons on you?”

  “No, I’m from Pakistan. I have a visa.”

  “Do you have your visa on your person?”

  “No, um, I don’t carry it with me.”

  “It’s illegal not to have it on you.”

  “I thought it wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Do you have your visa control number?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have any guns or weapons on you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you like guns?”

  “What? No, not really.”

  And around they go. Minutes pass.

  Usman sees a reporter approach, a woman, late thirties. She’s gazing warily at him as she motions to one of the officers to huddle, and they cozy up. She says she’s with the Washington-something—Usman can’t quite make it out, the Post, or the Washington Times—and he sees, with crushing clarity, what she and the gawking crowd, now rimming an estimated blast radius the size of a baseball diamond, all see: PAKISTANI TERROR SUSPECT ARRESTED AT WHITE HOUSE. The officer and she go around the corner to talk, privately, leaving Usman and the other officer alone at home plate. He wants to scream to her, to everyone, that he got an A in freshman English, that he’s read The Federalist Papers from beginning to end—in Urdu, for God’s sake—and can quote passages verbatim. Hamilton is standing right next to him. Ask Hamilton!

  He takes a deep breath and tries to reason with the remaining officer. “My passport is right in this building, right here.” He points to the office building over the officer’s shoulder, just across the street. “I work right there.”

  The officer turns, a muscular uniformed man looking up at this smooth temple of white-collar privilege, and then turns back.

  “You go to college in the U.S?”

  “Yes sir, I went to Connecticut College, in Connecticut, from 20
00 to 2004.” Thank God, the miracle of education. Keep talking. “And, um, last year I did a semester at Dartmouth, Dartmouth College, at the Tuck School, a pre–business school program.”

  “Dartmouth?” the officer says.

  Usman nods. A golden name, Dartmouth.

  “So, what, you’re some kind of smart ass?” The officer says this with a mocking tone, but Usman can’t find the edge, the pertinent context. Is it a class thing, or racial, or something someone from Dartmouth once did to this guy?

  “No sir, no, I’m not so smart.”

  JUST OVER ON THE SOUTH LAWN, George W. Bush steps up to the microphone. “Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Thanks for being here on this special day. Please be seated. America began with a Declaration that all men are created equal…”

  Black faces glower from the mostly hostile crowd of five hundred gathered on the freshly mowed grass. After Bush gives this short speech, he’ll sign the reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which finally put the full might of federal law and the federal courts behind the right of African Americans to vote.

  If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the stepfather. The Republican Congress, seeing a downturn in their poll numbers, actually pushed through the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act a year early to have something, anything, to court the black vote in November. The modern Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, has not been a favorite with blacks for decades—about 90 percent have voted Democratic since the New Deal. But the past few years have been notably miserable. Their current Republican standard-bearer, George W. Bush, got 8 percent of the black vote in 2000 and 12 percent in 2004, but after the Hurricane Katrina debacle in the fall of 2005, his approval rating among African Americans fell to an astonishing 2 percent. Early this year, Republicans in Congress appealed to Karl Rove; some had significant black populations in their districts, and Bush, along with the entire Republican leadership, needed to show a little effort. So the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized. And three weeks ago, Bush finally, after six years of demurrals, deigned to speak at the annual convention of the NAACP.