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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 27, 2002
Put out more flags
WASHINGTON. "Toledo with nuclear warheads." This was how a cultured member of the Bush administration described Washington to me. He was referring I think to Toledo Ohio not to Spain. Generations of European diplomats have likewise taken their turns sneering at this neo-classical shanty on the Potomac which some have compared unfavourably to Ottawa. It's one of those lines that won't leave your head and I've been thinking it while trudging to appointments in Washington this last week doing my job as flatfoot hack. But as another friend replied the Toledo comparison is idealistic. "That's exactly what Washington is meant to be." This is a secular democracy; that government governs best that governs least; and we look back nostalgically upon the days when the State War & Navy Departments could be housed in one medium hotel-sized building to balance the Treasury on the other side of the White House. For the Pentagon which now houses Navy and War is more a city than a building. The airliner that was flown into one of its five sides did horrific damage but only put a dent in it which the workmen will soon have repaired. Even from a distance it seems a hard building to miss a grim archetype for bureaucracy from the Second World War. But from inside rising from its subway stop and after passing through the layers of recent security to restaurants and cafes and shops and courtyards it seems sometimes more like the Mall of the Americas. The last time I dug in here was for the "impeachment stake-out" in 1999 when the press corps of the Western world came to watch President Clinton be humiliated (only to discover that it couldn't be done). It is my first visit here since "9/11" and I should say that the atmosphere is quite different. Take for instance the U.S. flag a little smaller than a basketball court draped Patton-style down the upper walls of an army recruitment office a block from my hotel and emblazoned with the words United We Stand . The security whenever you enter a large building with any kind of public pretension is like getting on airplanes all day. I dropped into the food court of the Old Post Office for a coffee and muffin and had almost circumnavigated the building before I found the unblocked entrance -- with its electronic gallows. Entrances with rising steps have been abandoned. (That would be pretty much every federal building.) Too much of a temptation for truck bombers. The shocking thing is that this security is necessary and probably incomplete. It is a wartime Washington again but under siege as it has never been before -- this continent not having been plausibly invaded since the arrival of my distant ancestors. I was amazed three years ago by the ease with which I could enter and exit congressional offices the Senate and House themselves drop into the innermost confines of Executive and State wearing the odd visitor's dog-tag; get pointed down an aisle by a friendly security guard. All those days are over possibly for my lifetime. And yet the biggest change in Washington is not the security consciousness or the proliferation of striped cloth. It has something to do with "the war" and something to do with the growth of American power over the last century. It is cumulative and quantitative yet at some unknown point the scale tipped and Washington permanently ceased to be say Toledo with wonderful museums. It has come instead to feel more like a conurbation at the centre of the world a magnet not only political but cultural -- for with power comes money and with money comes culture after minor infrastructural delays. The world now feels obliged to visit Washington as a kind of United Nations capital of the capitals. I find this as a journalist -- that I have come here less to call on U.S. government officials than to see specialists and intellectuals and powerful advisers and politicians-in-exile waiting for their turn of fate. People like Reza Pahlavi the claimant to the throne of Persia naturally set up in the suburbs of Washington and make their pitch according to the nostrums of the day. (When interviewed recently I am told he used the phrase "secular democracy" about thirty times in conversation and in case his point had been missed seized the interviewer's notebook on his way out the door and wrote "SECULAR DEMOCRACY" in capitals underlining.) Washington is now perhaps overtaking London as the zenana of choice for "liberal" Islamic scholars and scholars of Islam; and the Pentagon perhaps overtaking the State Department as the ultimate market for their wares. A certain gentleman with an office in the former is a firehose of information on the classical literature in Arabic Persian and Turkish; another hiding out from his fatwa is a textual expert on the Koran. Already impressive think tanks are scrambling to enhance their credentials in Islamic studies. Another thing struck me in making appointments -- how well Bush administration people seem informed about developments in Canada including political nuances as compared with the general ignorance in Canada of how the government works in DC. More generally the degree to which Washington and New York have replaced Paris and London as the cosmopolitan centres of the Western world the place you go to meet the most interesting and diverse minds from every national background. London is I think still in the league but Paris and the other European capitals have become parochial backwaters. At least this is what I'm told by Europeans I've spoken with recently. That this is a function of the immense contemporary American power I do not doubt. And yet it is also strangely an exhibition of how nature works to favour good over evil. Might obviously does not make right; and yet might attracts the means to prudent action. For there was a time many centuries ago when might had arranged itself around the Caliph at Baghdad and the worldly wise looked for employment and preferment there. Baghdad was once the great cosmopolitan centre. In President Bush chance has thrown up a leader actually capable of listening to advice and yet not smothered by it -- a wise Caliph I think and hope. It has installed him in a remarkable city one less and less Toledo and more and more like Rome. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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