Avuncular American

Algerian Elections June 1990

The most impressive tactic in the mass demonstration was the silence.

The bearded FIS - French acronym for the Islamic Salvation Front - demonstrators wound their way up the hills of Algiers in perfect order, even arranging their own ambulances in case of mishaps (there were none).  The silence was eloquent, and it showed better than any banner or slogan that the new party could impose discipline.  But could it get out the vote?

(image, Jurist, University of Pittsburgh)

It was spring 1990, and I had just arrived in Algeria to take up my new job at the American Embassy as head of the political section.  I had actually left a tropical paradise several months early to get to Algiers in time to cover the first contested elections since Algerian independence in 1962.  I knew it would be interesting, but I was unaware that I'd be a witness to a sea change in this North African country's history.

Twenty years later, we can look at Algeria's municipal and regional assembly elections of June 12, 1990 as a dangerous experiment in democracy, one that degenerated into a quasi-civil war after the Army canceled parliamentary elections that the FIS was slated to win in January 1992.  But that conventional wisdom is based on a certain determinism.  Algeria need not have descended into more than a decade of bloodletting.

In spring 1990, then Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid, two weeks before the elections, raised hopes when he said that "the time of top-down governance is over.  Ruling party and opposition must be elected, not co-opted or parachuted in by the machine."  Few believed that he was sincere.  After all, street signs in Algiers pointed to the "Headquarters of The Party," as in the single party, the FLN that had led the country to independence from France.

That blasé attitude was certainly present in a little corner restaurant where I'd stopped for lunch on June 12, taking a break from my urban walkabout to observe polling sites.  The man at the table near mine, a civil servant, wasn't even voting.  "Why bother?" he scoffed, "we know what the results will be."  That would have been true before June 1990, but that day, it was to be different.  The party that got out the vote would win.

And that's what the FIS did.  In polling place after polling place, I came across the ubiquitous FIS election observers.  All the parties were authorized to place their watchdogs at the election sites; only the FIS did it with any regularity.  Truth be told, some of the small "democratic" parties probably didn't have sufficient members to allow other than a symbolic presence.  But even the ruling FLN was absent.  Like my lunchtime friend, they said "why bother?"

The rest is history.  The FIS' 4.5 million votes were double that of the FLN, and left all other parties in the dust.  FIS members took up positions as mayors of Algiers, Oran, and all the major cities.  It maintained its hold on municipal and regional assemblies until its dissolution after the January 1992 coup.

Years later, I listened to an Algerian general at an international conference refer to "democratic terrorism" to explain the FIS electoral victories of June 1990 and December 1991, as if voting were somehow illegitimate if you disagreed with the results.  We know where that attitude led.

The world still hasn't come to grips with the quandary of what to do when the "wrong" side wins, especially when it's an Islamist party.  In Gaza, the Hamas winners of the January 2006 elections are still waiting to do their victory lap...

Diego Garcia: Freedom's Footprint, or Enduring Injustice?

Note: This article appears in the "Speaking Out" column of the June issue of the Foreign Service Journal, "The magazine for foreign affairs professionals" published by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).  I have wanted to write it ever since visiting Diego Garcia in 1989.

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In the last decades of the previous century, two isolated archipelagos continued to fly the Union Jack thousands of miles from the mother country, outposts for a handful of British citizens.  Located near strategic territory, these repositories for precious resources remained prized possessions even as the sun was setting on the rest of the empire.

In one of the archipelagos, the Falkland Islands, Britain went to war to eject enemy forces that claimed the territory.  In the other, the Chagos Islands, it welcomed friendly foreign troops, but exiled the islands’ inhabitants.

One can take the analogy between Diego Garcia (the principal island in the chain) and the Falklands too far, of course.  The foreign troops in the latter location only became the enemy in 1982, when a dictatorship sent them to grab the Malvinas, as Argentina still calls the Falklands.  And in the case of Diego Garcia, the United Kingdom was a full partner in making its territory available to the forces of its closest ally, the United States.

But the analogy, which has been made in the British press and courts, contains one very disturbing kernel of truth.  In the Falklands, the inhabitants are white, with implicit rights to protection as British citizens -- while the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, descendants of African slaves, were black, and weren’t even told that they were British citizens when they were summarily removed from the islands.  And why were they evicted?  Because the United States wanted all the islands depopulated.

A Lie Comes to Life

We think of Diego Garcia – if we think of this remote mid-Indian Ocean outpost at all – as a reassuring sandy aircraft carrier of an archipelago, ready to launch planes on missions to the Middle East or to Southwest Asia.  That role was conceived in the 1960s, when London agreed to lease Diego Garcia to Washington.  And if both parties are amenable to a renewal of the lease prior to 2016, Diego Garcia might well continue to serve its strategic role for the rest of the 21st century.

But the original agreement was based on a lie that wrecked the lives of the families who had been living on the islands for generations: that the islands were uninhabited.  To make this fiction a reality, the inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands – known as Chagossians or Ilois  – within the British Indian Ocean Territory had to go.

Culture: The Singing Diplomat

To be precise, it was actually the diplomat's wife who sang.

We were listening to Edith Piaf's unique voice - are any contemporary singers capable of even a tenth of her emotion-in-song? - when my wife remembered that we once attended a concert in Alexandria, Egypt, where the wife of the French Cultural Center director belted out "Je ne regrette rien" and some of Piaf's other hits.

That couple - though he didn't sing, he certainly knew talent - was a good example of what American cultural diplomat (retired) Patricia Kushlis (Whirled View) meant when she recently wrote about the practice of public diplomacy:

Academia doesn’t and can’t teach hands-on public diplomacy. It can teach about public diplomacy, its history and why it’s important for nurturing and sustaining America’s image abroad, and it can teach some of the skills needed, but not how to do it in practice. That comes from on-the-job experience and training.

There may be another aspect that Kushlis doesn't treat in her excellent post, but which is a standby in debate in public diplomacy circles: the lack of a cabinet level (or at least interagency) home for culture or cultural diplomacy.

What? Howls of protest from the State Department's ECA, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  Don't get me wrong: thank God for ECA, which during the dark years of Iraq, WMD, GWOT, and "with us or against us" had to soldier on, battling in an internal culture war within an administration that weaponized everything, including ideas.

My point is not to criticize US efforts in cultural diplomacy, but to say that other countries see it as more central to their international presence.  Take France, again.  After our dynamic singing cultural duo in "Alex" in the eighties, along comes to Alexandria Olivier Poivre d'Arvror, a man of letters from a family of cultural icons (for more than twenty years his brother Patrick - "PPDA" - was a household name, the Dan Rather of French TV).

Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, who recently published an erudite and beautiful book "Alexandrie Bazar: le roman d'une ville" (image above)  on the city that came to captivate him (it does, I can attest), also heads CulturesFrance, an organization of the French MFA and its Ministry of Culture and Communication.  I know, the US does not have either of the latter, considering perhaps that communication is best handled by spokespeople ("we got 'em in every agency"), and that culture isn't something that you can identify, let alone bureaucratize.

CulturesFrance, whose Euros 35 million budget could fit into a subchapter of the State Department's, may get more bang for its buck, if, as I suspect, France could beat the US in a word association competition with the word "culture."  Think Alliance Française, think Institut Français, etc.  It also doesn't hurt that their Minister of Culture, despite a bothersome fracas a few months ago about his extracurricular proclivities, is another cultural household name.

The US long ago gave up many - but not all (Alex lives!) - of its cultural centers, preferring in some administrations to pursue "placement" (get those press releases on US policy toward Cuba in all the local papers) or in others to wage "the battle of ideas."  A little too much war, maybe not enough love.

I only dabbled in public diplomacy in my years in the Foreign Service, perhaps an illustration of what Pat Kushlis sees as "public diplomacy in the State Department has been too often treated as a “throw away."  If they let me be an acting Public Affairs Officer...  Actually, I took the job pretty seriously, and had lots of fun while I was at it.  Which goes back to her point: public diplomacy and cultural diplomats are made in the doing, not the preaching.

Short of hiring writers, composers, or artists for the US PD function, maybe the most that can be done in the US way of diplomacy is appointing a few cultural people as political ambassadors.  Instead of only rewarding the bundlers who bring in the big bucks, maybe send Oprah as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and shake things up a bit.  Or how about Angelina Jolie to Burma - she's already a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

I vote for the Dixie Chicks as special Middle East Peace envoys.  They have a certain amount of cred.

WW II + 65: Say It With Stamps

It's fitting that former enemies and inheritors of former regimes got together today in Moscow for what may be one of the last big World War II commemorations that can include numbers of walking veterans.  Quite right, too, that the country that suffered the greatest number of casualties be the host.  It's hard to see how Germany could have been defeated without the Red Army's determination.  Click on the stamp at left for an example of the Soviet-era heroic gigantism prevalent in the USSR (from StampRussia).

That other Ally that withstood alone on the Western Front, Great Britain, is of course personified by its wartime leader, Winston Churchill.  His voice, his profile, his very pugnaciousness, stood for so much in the years before the US entered the war.  From the British Postal Museum Archive.

Marching in Moscow for the first time today was the United States, which not only saved the Brits from the Germans, but had to fight off the Japanese throughout the Pacific.  The cartoonist Bill Mauldin, beloved of the foot soldiers but mistrusted by the brass for the scruffy image he gave to GIs, is portrayed in this US Postal Service stamp. Rounding out the Big Four was China, but not the China of Communist Beijing.  Nationalist China, under Chiang Kai-Shek, was at the table with its Soviet, American, and British allies.  No more Soviets at the Kremlin these days, and the Nationalists had to watch the ceremony from Taiwan.  From StampsOfChina.

Finally, France, which though not a member of the wartime Big Four, did manage to stay in the big power league thanks to the sheer will power of then General De Gaulle.  Thanks to French postwar leaders managing to overcome their hatred of Germany for outrages like Oradour (hundreds of men, women, and children killed in cold blood, the entire village burnt to the ground), we have a united Europe today.  Stamp from Timbres-de-France.

Okay, world leaders, well done in the war memorial category.  Now please work together on that even bigger goal: saving the planet from its multiple non-military threats.  It's a much harder target to zero in on.

Cheer Up, Europe: The War's Over

You wouldn't know it, by the looks of the headlines:

"Gloom across Europe as crisis shadow intensifies" Financial Times

"Zeal and angst: Germany torn over role in Europe" Wall Street Journal

"AMB. JOHN BOLTON: We shouldn't rescue Europe" FOXNews.com

Thanks, Ambassador Bolton.  Glad you weren't around during World War II.  And I don't think the Europeans have actually asked the US to rescue them this time.

No, you wouldn't know that today really should be a day of celebration.  65 years of peace across a continent ravaged by two world wars last century.  VE Day - Victory in Europe - never was much celebrated in the United States, which preferred to lump its commemoration of its dead of all wars in May's Memorial Day.

But on this side of the Atlantic, as the BBC On This Day website reminds us, Britons lost no time in celebrating the end of hostilities in Europe on May 8, 1945.  They cheered PM Winston Churchill, "for he's a jolly good fellow."  Didn't keep them, two months later, from voting him out of office.  Gordon Brown shouldn't feel so bad.

VE Day on May 8 is a public holiday in many European countries, though at places like NATO HQ, where some of the losing countries of the war are now major players, it doesn't do to mention the war.  So we have instead the celebration of the postwar peace, embodied in Europe Day, May 9, celebrating 60 years since Robert Schuman sketched out what has since become the European Union.

If only the general mood matched the upbeat Euro-phoria of the Europe Day poster gallery.  It's hard to find committed Europhiles, especially in places like the British Conservative Party, which just may be poised to take over the helm of what is already a Euro-sceptic nation.

Even on the continent, the angst and gloom is general: in Greece, the epicenter of the latest financial-fiscal crisis, it has erupted into violence.  Here in Brussels, a city whose name is synonymous with the EU, not even Europe can appear to help a country seemingly bent on endless separatism in a slow "death of a thousand cuts."

Too bad Europeans don't see the BIG PICTURE.  Which is, 65 years of peace, the product of an alphabet soup of interlocking institutions: NATO, EU, COE, OSCE, OECD.  These "supranational European bodies" might bore you to death with their endless diplo-speak of collective security, single currency, subsidiarity... but these weighty words keep the swords from being rattled.  If you can't make out the Euler diagram (click on image below) of these overlapping institutions, check out this excellent Wikipedia graph.

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," Winston Churchill is reputed to have said.  The European Union does talk to excess, at times, but 65 years of jaw-jaw is better than 6 months of war-war.  Europe, count your blessings, do the necessary, and keep that stiff upper lip in the face of a little currency crisis.  It's important, but seen in perspective, pales when the alternatives to collective security are considered.

There is strength in numbers.

Little Church In the Wilderness

God is silent, now if only we can get Man to shut up.

Woody Allen*

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No doubt the Pope is wishing his household priest had quoted Woody Allen in his homily instead of the anonymous Jewish friend whose mention of antisemitism has caused such a firestorm within a conflagration.  But then humor is kind of hard to insert into an Easter service at a time of deep humiliation and hurt in the Catholic church.

At least we still have Maureen Dowd writing about "unholy week," keeping up the drumbeat despite the Vatican 's attempt to exorcise her.

The "little church" I'm thinking about is not, obviously, the Vatican, which, despite its loss of the Papal States centuries ago, despite the anachronism of a religion endowed with a Secretary of State and a legion of nuncios (priestly diplomats) and other trappings of temporal power, still invokes the Pope's "head of state" status.  Usually this is good for protocol purposes, though it's unlikely that, as the head of a church of a billion or so people, the Pope would ever get anything less than regal treatment when visiting foreign leaders.  Now, though, the head of state moniker will serve to avoid having to be discomfited by lawsuits.

No, the "little church in the wilderness" is figurative, my way of commiserating with the millions of Catholics out there who would feel rather uncomfortable amidst the gilt, the crimson, the ever-so-worldly ostentation of Vatican City.  I've pictured above, for literal purposes, a church we once found while hiking in the Dolomites, but my "little church" is everywhere and anywhere, with normal people whose good priests and nuns tend to their parishes.

Beyond the current furor over the pedophilia, and whether or not you think that the priestly condition of celibacy has ceased to be viable, there is the general direction of the Vatican under this Pope.  Consider what an eminent Egyptian Jesuit has to say:

The great progress made over the last half century is on hold at this time. Facing this almost devastating situation, the church's leadership... minimize[s] the seriousness of the situation and console[s] themselves by focusing on a resurgence of the most traditionalist factions...

Father Henri Boulad wrote the above in July 2007.  If the situation was already "devastating" then, what would he say now?

The progress he's referring to was the great liberal reform of Vatican II, over which Pope Benedict has the same reaction as right wing cultural warriors in the US over the Sixties.  Just like conservatives in the US would like to erase the Kennedy-Johnson era and start history with Ronald Reagan, so too would Pope Benedict XVI overturn the work of Pope John XXIII (Vatican postage stamp, right).  As Father Boulad wrote, in the early Sixties Pope John XXIII "tried to reverse four centuries of stagnation, but there is an impression that the church is gradually closing the doors that it opened at that time."

When Father Boulad refers to "traditionalist factions" encouraged by Pope Benedict, he's referring to such reactionary organizations as Opus Dei, whose heroes include Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco; the St. Pius  X Society and its Holocaust deniers; and the Legionaries of Christ, recently caught up in its own sex scandal and whose list of American apologists, according to Tim Rutten's recent article in the Los Angeles Times

reads like a who's who of the conservative Catholic intellectuals who, in recent years, have insisted that Catholicism and membership in the Democratic Party are all but incompatible.

This is the world of "traditionalist factions" beloved of Pope Benedict.  Beyond concerns over tone-deafness on pedophilia, Catholics in "little churches" around the world must be sick in the stomach over where the Pontiff is leading them.  Back to pre-Vatican II?  That's much too recent.  How about back to the Middle Ages?

* Woody Allen in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

US To Lose Its World Focus

On April 2, to be precise.

That's when PBS channel WNET will broadcast the final airing of its international TV news program World Focus.  Full disclosure: Avuncular American is on World Focus' "Blogwatch" roll, and I'm not sure what will become of its eclectic and world-spanning collection of blogs.  Like the TV program, the Blogwatch people at World Focus sought out blogs from every corner of the world.

These days, interesting websites come and go - Baghdad Burning and The Hegemonist were two excellent blogs 'til they just stopped in their tracks - with such regularity that some people might not get worked up about the loss of a TV news program.  The difference being the international focus of WF, and that it was on American TV screens.  American audiences have already seen the steady diminution of international coverage from the heydays of network news in the 60s and 70s, when the Big Three of CBS, NBC, and ABC fielded correspondents across the globe.

The sad announcement from World Focus explained that it was all about money: great concept, growing audience, but expensive to produce in recessional America, when all kinds of great ideas must scrounge for dwindling philanthropic resources.  How many former donors were burned by Bernie, or lost it all with Lehman?

Worked up about a TV program that I don't even watch (my capacity for video streaming in a two-inch square box is limited to cute kitty videos that last 90 seconds)?  No, it's especially about a lost opportunity for Americans to learn more about the world than breathless anchor coverage of Haitian disasters can provide.

Next lost opportunity to mourn: the world's ability to learn about America through sites like the New York Times, which, after an apparently unsatisfactory pay-as-you-go experience a couple of years ago, is going to give it a go again.  Yes, I know that journalists have to be paid and the lights kept on, but readership will inevitably shift to those papers, like The Guardian, which plan to remain free.  I love The Guardian, and it has excellent coverage of US topics through columnists like Gary Younge and Michael Tomasky.  But it's a UK-based paper.

World focus, both inbound and outbound, is an activity that also needs to have its US practitioners.

Image: FocusTestChart.com

Healthy Boost For Obama's International Standing

"It's Safe To Come To America"

Such a headline might be premature - the US House of Representatives' passage of the Senate Health Care Reform bill is only hours old, and even after the President's signature, will require time for implementation.  In the meantime, foreigners traveling to the US will still need to check the fine print of their insurance policies, many of which exclude the US, given its costly and byzantine health care system.

Byzantium just got updated, though it's not over 'til it's over.  Meaning that even though this reform represents historic progress, much more needs to be done to make affordable health care available to all.  The training of new doctors and nurses.  The reform of tort laws and accompanying stratospheric malpractice insurance.  Instituting a culture of preventive medicine and prophylactic public health.

Fixated as Americans were on the outcome of yesterday's vote, they may have missed the fact that foreigners were too, especially foreign leaders.  It went beyond European incomprehension at American reluctance to join the club of civilized health care providing nations.  Had the President not succeeded with his own party, on the key domestic proposal of his first term, what would happen to US leadership abroad?  That breeze you feel coming off the Atlantic is a huge sigh of relief.

We were on the road all day Sunday, driving through France back to Belgium, and the BBC provided regular real time updates on the state of the vote. French commentators noted that Benyamin Netanyahu, who treated Vice President Biden with barely concealed contempt as little as a week ago, will be meeting a President Obama newly invigorated by his domestic victory.

The Obama Way should be especially instructive for the Israeli Prime Minister.  The President focused on a major problem, persevered when pundits said the patient was dead, and pulled off a reform that is being compared with the major progressive initiatives (Social Security, Medicare) of the last century.  Now that he'll be more free to zero in on the Middle East, the moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians will likely be tops among his major international priorities.

Important as the health care vote is, it is a reminder that nothing comes easily, and that the Democrats can count on no Republican support.  The sole priority for Republicans appears to block what they can, and that includes necessary reforms of America's casino financial system.

At least now those ads promoting travel to the US (which did get bipartisan support) can include some very good news on the health front.

Loaded Lexicon: Genocide, Apartheid, Fundamentalism

Bet you thought the US Congress was busy sorting out health care last week, or tackling unemployment.  Well, they may one day return to those rather crucial domestic issues, but not before dealing with pressing foreign policy matters, such as condemnation of the four decade-old occupation of Cyprus, and labeling almost century-old massacres of Armenians as genocide.

The point in common is casting Turkey as the bad guy.  The other point in common is Israel.  As MJ Rosenberg noted in Media Matters Action Network, Israel had heretofore taken the Turkish view that the Ottoman-era bloodletting should not be labeled as genocide.  In any case, Israel has always looked askance at others' attempts to appropriate the terms genocide and holocaust.  But, says Rosenberg

since the Gaza war, Turkish-Israeli relations have deteriorated.  The Turks... were appalled by the Israeli onslaught against the Gazans. And said so. Ever since, the Netanyahu government has made a point to stick it to the Turks. That battle is now being carried to Washington.  The Israelis are trying to teach the Turks a lesson.  If the Armenian resolution passes the House, it will not be for purely compassionate reasons, but rather, to send a message to Turkey:  if you mess with Israel, its lobby will make Turkey pay a price in Washington.

The Obama Administration opposes the resolution, and it may not go beyond the Committee stage.  But the point is that, like the noise about Cyprus, the pro-Israel lobby can wag the Congressional dog with impunity.  For Turkey, like for Israel, and for the US, words do matter.

Like the word apartheid, which Israel would like to see relegated to the history books concerning South Africa, period.  It bristles at the notion (anytime, but especially this week) that there is a parallel between its separation walls, checkpoints, bypass roads, ethnic ID cards, segregated housing on occupied land... and similar practices that ended with majority rule in South Africa.  Use the word apartheid and Israel in the same sentence (oops, just did) and you'll incur the wrath of its formidable PR machine.

Word association test: if I say fundamentalism, what word immediately flashes through your brain?  Be honest: "Islamic," of course.  As if Muslims, in their infinite variety, had a corner on the market for religious extremism.  We know to our chagrin that Christians include a fair number of end-days fundamentalists in their midst, including in the person of a certain FOX  News personality.

And ask Palestinians how it is to live in ground zero of inter-religious fundamentalisms, where home-grown Islamists attempt to crowd out secular Muslims and Christians, and where Jewish settlers claiming Biblical rights to the exclusion of all others get succor from millennial American Christians, who see the Holy Land as a convenient setting for rapture.   The Palestinians know that "fundamentalism" is ecumenical in its application.

So next time Congress tries to be helpful in throwing around loaded terms like "genocide" and threatening relations with longstanding allies like Turkey, or condemning "occupation" in Cyprus but ignoring a longer occupation in the West Bank, maybe it should consider the utility of sticking to the facts on the ground, instead of words that can be defined according to the political beliefs of the interested parties. 

Eisenhower Wept: Embassy London's Grosvenor Farewell

Think of it as akin to Canada picking up sticks from its gleaming Embassy edifice opposite the Capitol and moving to the towers of Crystal City.  Sure, it's still near the Metro, and you can glimpse the Potomac, but people would ask what does it mean?

Don't worry, the Canadians aren't about to leave their prized perch, where Congress is reminded daily of the United States' northern neighbor.

But, as we were reminded by yesterday's announcement of the choice of an architect, the US is leaving its historic Embassy location on London's Grosvenor Square, whose postal code W1A 1AE gives you an idea how central it is to Britain's political institutions.  The Qataris are buying it.

We are, you see, moving to the Borough of Wandsworth across the Thames.  The Wandsworth Council (thanks for the architect's drawing) is happy about what it terms

the biggest regeneration opportunity in central London. The Council has identified the potential for thousands of new homes and jobs in the area which stretches from Vauxhall Bridge to Battersea Park.

Battersea, for those of you who know London, is best known for its huge (defunct) power station on the Thames, and Vauxhall (of car manufacturing fame) is the "post-industrial" neighborhood that is now home to the new MI6 HQ (at least the secret part of the "special relationship" will be closer, literally).  There is also, apparently, a memorial to Benedict Arnold in the neighborhood.

I wouldn't want to begrudge the people of Wandsworth this development opportunity, but how many foreign embassies in Washington are moving to Northeast D.C. in the cause of urban development and diversity?  Likewise, I'm happy that the architect is as energy-conscious as security-aware, choosing "miracle polymer" ETFE, which appears to be a material of the future.

But what does it mean?

A decade ago, I was working at the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square.  I used to see small groups of demonstrators line up outside my window, protesting about whatever US policy they objected to at the moment.  This was 1999-2000, and though we were in our pre-9/11 mode, we were anything but blissfully ignorant about the need to enhance security.

The demonstrators weren't the problem - Grosvenor Square had accommodated thousands during anti-Vietnam War protests in the Sixties - and the Metropolitan Police kept them in check.  Vehicular proximity was a real concern, and we were working with the authorities and the neighbors to find a solution.  We even had worked out an arrangement with the Canadian High Commission - across the Square, in a building that used to be our pre-1960 Embassy building - to rent some of their unused office space while whole sections of our chancery underwent major security and other upgrades.

Then September 11, 2001 happened, and I guess all these plans (I had already moved on) were put on the shelf.  By the time I wandered back to Number 1 Grosvenor Square a couple of years later, the place was a maze of concrete bunkers and barriers, and if I was put off, imagine the effect on the locals.

So, what does it mean?  One, it means that the State Department has decided that for its Embassy in the UK to be "modern, open, and secure," it must leave its historic location.  When I say historic, I don't mean the present building only, which was the height of architectural modernity when it opened.  As Philip Kennicott writes in today's Washington Post

The relocation... breaks a tradition of American diplomacy at Grosvenor Square dating to John Adams's appointment as the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James's in 1785.

Will the new Qatari owners care about the statue of Dwight Eisenhower that graces Grosvenor Square outside the current embassy?  Maybe it can be moved to Embassy Wandsworth, which will become the new symbol of Brand America.

Does the move indicate that we've decided that, like a mutant diamond, "terrorism is forever?"  Terrorism isn't new, only its weapons are.   And believe me, ETFE notwithstanding, if someone wants to find a way to target an embassy, they will.  Just as you lock your car door, you do want to put reasonable obstacles in their way.  But they will evolve beyond truck bombs, and already have, as we learned on 9/11.

The only thing I can say is that care has been taken to incorporate aesthetics into things like stand back, blast barriers, and polymers.  That is much more than can be said of the generation of "Inman Embassies," whose design often resembled forbidding fortresses.

The days of building new American Embassies in leafy residential neighborhoods have long been over, though many older ones still exist, beefed-up though they have been with bollards and, ick, barbed wire.  Maybe the bronze Eisenhower statue can be uprooted and moved across the Thames, where future embassy staffers can contemplate with irony the words from his inauguration, etched on the pedestal:

"The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world."