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GREETINGS FROM THE 'WAR ZONE.' It's just two days until Joe Biden's inauguration, and you have undoubtedly heard Washington referred to as a "war zone," or perhaps an "armed camp." Truth is, in most parts of the city you would never know anything special was going on. There are no signs of coming events.
Yes, there are a lot of security checkpoints, temporary fencing, boarded-up buildings, and National Guard troops in a large area encompassing the area between the Capitol and the White House. Rather than a scene from Fallujah, it's more like a beefed-up version of the security seen at the political conventions in recent years.
But that hasn't stopped the hyperbolic descriptions of Washington on the eve of the inauguration. Descriptions like the one offered by Alex Wagner, of Showtime's "The Circus," who said, "I have traveled to places on the Chad-Sudan border, and the Thai-Burma border, to places with very unstable governments, and it turns out that ours is just the same." No, it's really not.
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All the talk was too much for some people who have spent time in real war zones, where residents are bombed and strafed and otherwise slaughtered. "It's extremely degrading to people who have actually lived through war and foreign occupation and have actually seen tanks rolling down their streets and foreign soldiers occupying their land or their own soldiers deployed against them," an adviser who worked with the U.S. military during the Iraq war told the Washington Post. Still, don't expect the dramatic pronouncements to stop.
The hope here in Washington, in the wake of the Capitol riot, is that the intense security is a predictable variety of bureaucratic overkill in which the barn door is shut, and bolted, and heavily guarded after the horse has left. Remember that the Biden inauguration was going to be a mostly virtual event anyway, because of the COVID pandemic. Now, after the riot, the mayor of the District of Columbia, along with the governors of Maryland and Virginia, are urging everyone not to come to the Washington area this week. All the security, plus very few people, is, they hope, a recipe for nothing bad to happen.
One possible preview came in state capitals across the nation on the weekend. There were predictions that far-right protesters would mass in one city after another for violent demonstrations as President Trump prepares to leave office. More than a dozen states called out the National Guard. Many more imposed heavy security. And then…the predictions were wrong.
All the barricades and barbed wire and heavily armed troops, the New York Times reported, was for "a handful of protesters, most from the right, a few from the left, many looking more like ragtag stragglers than the furious mob of Trump supporters that ransacked the U.S. Capitol more than a week ago."
More from the Times: "In Concord, New Hampshire, five masked men dressed in tactical gear and carrying assault rifles gathered on the sidewalk in front of the statehouse lawn to express concerns about 'government overreach.' In Lansing, Michigan, National Guard soldiers watched as a dozen members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois group showed up with military-style weapons." In Denver, almost no protesters showed up; one who did wondered whether he had come on the wrong day. In Salem, Oregon, less than a dozen showed up. In Lincoln, Nebraska, there were exactly two protesters. So much for that surge of violence.
So the inauguration nears. And no, Washington is not a "war zone." And the hope is that the inauguration, and its surrounding events, will unfold peacefully. If that happens, will it be the result of the huge increase in security, suggesting that future public events should be similarly locked down and militarized? Or will it be because the Capitol riot, once people gain some historical perspective, was a singular occurrence, and not the first sign of a wave of civil disorder across the country?
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