There is something ineffably poignant living here in the eye of the storm. Perhaps because it is the calm before an even worse storm? Intelligence reports genuinely suggest that anthrax, smallpox and perhaps even a suitcase nuclear bomb could yet be unleashed on Washington from, say, some anonymous flat across the river in Arlington; certainly many Washingtonians, hitherto wrapped in complacent cocoons of self-importance, now fear themselves to be in personal danger.
Friends who are also senior members of the Bush administration are working 20 hours a day at the White House or the National Security Agency, failing even to find time to obey President Bush's injunctions to go to church. Everyone has their own horror stories, ranging from the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's account of how he was flying to Washington and could see palls of smoke rising from his own Pentagon from 50 miles away; to how a fellow soccer parent, Michele Heidenberger, was the flight attendant on the American Airlines plane that flew into the Pentagon and was invested with the normally routine task of holding the cockpit-door key.
In the grounds of Washington's National Cathedral, electronic bells ring out on Sunday lunchtime as a schoolgirls' soccer match gets under way; very small children gather for a "walk for the homeless", and each is given an American flag to wave as they walk. A military helicopter circles incongruously overhead. Parents, fresh from church and most wearing red, white and blue lapel ribbons, voice their feelings: "Afghanistan," one father announces with grim satisfaction, "will be a parking lot in a few days." Outside, beefy young men drive around honking their horns in jeeps festooned with the Stars and Stripes. Signs saying "Don't mess with the US!" are stapled to trees. One retired US military officer is saying on National Public Radio: "We've got to do whatever it takes to make the rest of the world think like we do." A parent chimes in: "The sermon in the cathedral was about turning the other cheek." He is shaking his head in disbelief.
What is so poignant is that these are all decent, sane, educated Americans - some of them touched personally by the fearsome events of 11 September. But, as I wrote last week, they have yet to assimilate the realisation that America lost its innocence on that terrible day - that it became as vulnerable to disagreeable outside forces as the rest of us. But they still believe wholeheartedly that American might must always be right. In the war that so many now anticipate with relish, they believe the US will once again confirm its omnipotence. They just have to await confirmation of this, when they will finally settle down in front of their televisions to see satisfying fireworks lighting up Kabul or Jalalabad or Baghdad, live from CNN; their faith in the Bush administration to deliver on its oratorical undertakings of past days is both touching and alarming for those of us who feel more detached from such nationalistic fervour.
There is genuine bewilderment - which quickly fans into anger - over why anybody would want to do something so horrible to so beautiful and free a country as the US. Americans have had it drilled into them by their schools and churches since infancy that theirs is the land of the free and home of the brave. And doesn't that make America both uniquely different and superior to all other countries? It is something those of us who regard ourselves as friends of America have to face: that the vast majority of Americans see themselves and their country as superior to the remaining 95 per cent of the world. The logic is thus inescapable: to Americans, any terrorists attacking their country must be evil crackpots consumed by envy and jealousy of US lifestyles. And these crackpots can and must be eradicated (or "taken out" in the again fashionable machospeak) so that America can triumphantly carry on being the land of the free and home of the brave. The innate goodness of America is such that any outbreak of anti-American violence must just be a weird aberration.
This is the alarmingly simplistic position that the US has got itself into since 11 September. Because American newspapers and television (with a handful of exceptions) have such woeful news coverage of the rest of the world, Americans tend to be ignorant of foreign affairs; they have no conception whatsoever of how much their country and what it stands for are despised by scores of millions of people, especially in the Arabic and billion-strong Muslim countries.
In some cases, that may indeed be the result of envy and jealousy. The world's deprived see a window into an apparently more seductive and affluent lifestyle via televisions, yet then find that mighty government departments such as the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service are devoted to keeping them out of a land that is supposed to be so free to the wretched, yearning masses.
But in other cases - even, we must presume, in that of the wretched multimillionaire Osama Bin Laden - the despising is based on a genuine, if fanatical, repulsion towards America, its ideals and practices, and its self-satisfaction.
The moment this fault line in the American approach to its terrorist attackers is exposed - the belief that they are confined to a relatively easily identifiable network of evildoers, shunned instinctively by the rest of the world and whose whereabouts can therefore ultimately be firmly established - both the approach of the administration and the jingoistic bellicosity of the American public become positively dangerous.
History, after all, is not on America's side: even if we take the example of Northern Ireland as a microcosm, terrorism that emanated from a tiny geographical area and an equally small population could not be contained over a generation by a modern Nato army. The Provisional IRA's bombers and shooters comprised a small number of usually young men who lived within a population that would, if put to the test, shelter and protect those same young men because gut sympathies did not lie with Britain.
In a war with any Arab and Muslim communities or countries, this same phenomenon will multiply exponentially. The US (and its "allies", including Britain) would, in effect, be fighting the Vietcong again - but this time the enemy would be scattered throughout the world, rather than being confined to small pockets of Northern Ireland or Vietnam. What is now being proposed here, put simply, is a war America cannot win.
There is another dangerous phenomenon that is now being increasingly fostered by the media here. Precisely because routine coverage of world affairs is so dire, Americans tend only to be able to comprehend the world outside as comprising goodies and baddies, those who are with America or against. This approach is then further simplified into identifying symbolic individual monsters: a couple of decades ago, the man every American loved to hate was Colonel Gaddafi; ten years later, it was Saddam Hussein; now Osama Bin Laden is the devil incarnate about whom every American has become an instant expert, courtesy of CNN.
Yet the problem is not one evil mastermind in the way Hollywood would have it, but the major fissures and tensions within the world that have developed over centuries - long before America's existence, even. (It still does not occur to the vast majority of Americans, I suspect, that there is any connection between Arab and Muslim opposition to the US and Washington's staunchly pro-Israel policies.) Would American rage be assuaged, I wonder, if the Taliban presented Bin Laden on a plate to the US so that he could be strapped down on the same executioners' gurney as Timothy McVeigh? Certainly not: much more blood has to be spilt to avenge this act against a country whose collective philosophy is based much more on Old Testament vengeance than the Christian forgiveness it nominally supports in such huge numbers.
I talked to an American mother at the kids' walk for the homeless at the National Cathedral who had lived in Britain for ten years, and thus had a perspective denied most Americans. "We've got to stop being the braggarts on the international playground," she said. "We're too full of ourselves. If we go in, we must darned well get it right. Two wrongs don't make a right."
This was one of the few sane, restrained conversations I have had with anybody here since 11 September. But in an unreported comment, Colin Powell - despite having been a hawkish general, he is now the politically most moderate voice at the top of the Bush administration - said that he realised that many of the Taliban want to be made martyrs, and that in Afghanistan "life is a vale of tears where death can be a joyful deliverance".
But, as I have reported here before, that moderate voice of Powell is increasingly being marginalised by the cold-war mentality and ferocity of the troika of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush himself ("We're gonna smoke 'em out"). There have now been literally thousands of attacks on Muslim institutions and on people looking vaguely Arab. A petrol bomb was thrown at a mosque in Texas, while dozens of others have been attacked or daubed by graffiti ("sand niggers"). A large proportion of taxi drivers in DC are Iraqi or Iranian; most now stay at home. A man with a pistol drove his car on to the lawn of the Saudi embassy here, close to me. Even Sikhs and Sikh businesses, totally removed from the conflict, have been attacked: after all, they wear turbans, so they must surely be wogs up to no good?
To his credit, Bush visited the Islamic Center in DC last Monday. But the same day, he could not resist that bragging which seems perfectly natural to Americans, but which so irritates nearly all the rest of the world: "We're the greatest entrepreneurial society in the world. We've got the best farmers and ranchers in the world." And so on. In the days following the attacks, Bush gradually grew into his tough-guy oratorical role: instead of the hijackers being "folks", they metamorphosed into "evil-doers . . . barbaric people".
Predictably, Bush's popularity polls have now soared beyond even those of his father in the midst of the Gulf war - but that underlying doubt about his capacity to handle the crisis, and his evocation of "Wanted - Dead or Alive" posters in Westerns (vis-a-vis Bin Laden), remain a topic of sotto voce conversations here; there is a tacit assumption among senior Republicans that Dick Cheney is the one in charge, and was on the day of the hijackings and Bush's peculiar absence. But an official who had three hours of "face time" with Bush on the day after the hijackings insisted to me that - notwithstanding his nervy appearances in public - Bush was calm. We will see. In the meantime, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, has won the most public admiration for remaining on Ground Zero (as the TV stations, irritatingly, now refer to Lower Manhattan) and being a figure of visible, even heroic, authority when that was most needed.
But Bush's attempt to put together the same kind of symbolic international coalition that fought the Gulf war - his father's main achievement as president - was faltering within a week of the outrages. Belgium, Norway, Italy and Germany all made noises distancing themselves from Lord Robertson's almost immediate invocation of Nato solidarity; Americans preferred to look away when Pakistanis said that their country would become the graveyard of the US army if it invaded.
The very first international visitor who happened to be in Washington at the time was John Howard, the Australian prime minister; Bush was momentarily buoyed by Australian pronouncements of solidarity, especially when Howard took the opportunity to point out that Australia is the only country in the world to have fought alongside the US in every war it has ever fought.
The next important international visitor was President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world. On Wednesday came Jacques Chirac - and then, finally, Tony Blair was allowed his would-be Churchillian photo-op meeting with Bush on the understanding that Britain would offer unconditional support, a blank cheque of solidarity for whatever plans the troika is cooking up. Despite the assumption in London that Britain is always considered to be the US's most important ally, that is not the universal view here. Even in the Gulf war, in which the British government and media would have us believe Britain played a militarily crucial role, only 5.59 per cent of troops were actually British. We can be confident that any British involvement in Bush Jr's self-proclaimed "war against terrorism" will be equally symbolic and minimal, though that is not how it will be presented to the baying British public.
And so there it is: this country, and in particular the capital, remain locked in a curious mix of sombreness, anger and a certainty that the outrages will be satisfactorily avenged. I have two friends who watched people jump out of the World Trade Center, and one of them working in an adjoining financial skyscraper saw a giant airliner pass literally feet from her 54th-floor window before tearing into one of the 110-storey towers. Both are tough and each happens to have been a veteran of Belfast: but I suspect the impact of such traumas will live with them for ever, as it will for thousands of others. Heaven knows what effect their non-stop work will have on the rescue workers in New York and the Pentagon, too. The television channels, meanwhile, continue with their relentlessly hyped-up, often hysterical and frequently inaccurate coverage ("America United" is the mantra of Rupert Murdoch's Fox news channel). I'm sure it would help the nation calm down if only such channels voluntarily shut down for a week and let us all mourn in peace.
The flags, the flags, those ever-proliferating flags. By now, they have become a symbol not so much of grief over what has happened, but of bellicosity over what their wielders hope will soon happen - revenge and war. They have thus become symbols of aggression rather than of half-mast, tranquil sadness.
It remains all so poignant here in the eye of the storm, because the rage can only grow and yet cannot adequately ever be assuaged. America has embarked on a course it cannot win and which will bring it only yet more grief, at a time in its history when it can least bear it. It is a combustible combination of circumstances, and it will give all of us uncertain futures for years to come.
