Article content Anyone who genuinely cares about the fate of the 245-year American experiment in revolutionary democracy might be forgiven for having wishfully imagined last Wednesday that the excitement in Washington, D.C. was really just about an extraordinary lapse in security planning, and a howling mob of slack-jawed yokels had managed to rampage through the Capitol Building after having taken Donald Trump’s deranged rhetoric more seriously than the outgoing president had intended. And you could say there is a kernel of truth to that version of events. But it’s just a kernel. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the terrorist outrages that have occurred in the NATO capitals over the past few years, it’s that it usually takes several days for the facts to sink in and the true story to reveal itself.