WASHINGTON INSIGHT

WAR GAMES: Top-ranking Marine Corps generals gathered in mid-May for a secret two-day session to simulate what the Bush Administration has insisted is not in the cards: direct U.S. intervention in the South American drug war.

The war game, directed by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr., was described by sources as a highly realistic exercise that pitted “blue” armies of the United States and the three Andean nations against “red” forces of narcotics traffickers. While details of the simulation remain classified, one officer said commanders considered a variety of possibilities because “you can’t nail down a good counter-narcotics war scenario.”

Marine Corps officials insisted that the Quantico, Va., session was designed merely to educate, not plan. But other Administration sources said the meeting was part of a broader Marine effort to gain a leading role in an expanded military anti-drug effort.

Noting that the Marines had lost out when the Colombian government vetoed a plan to station rapid-deployment troops on U.S. carriers off its coast, the sources said the corps had made clear its determination to find another niche. “This is the biggest game going,” one official said, “but so far, the Marines have mostly been sitting on the bench.”

NEWS MANAGEMENT: A series of backfires involving efforts to manage the news have set the White House to grumbling.

White House aides traveled to the Houston economic summit primed to ballyhoo a new environmental initiative by Presdient Bush. Fact sheets had been prepared, and press releases were ready to go. The initiative--a new global treaty to protect the world’s forests--was designed in part to counter negative publicity about Bush’s refusal to allow strong language on global warming to be put in the summit’s final declaration.

But Chief of Staff John H. Sununu refused to allow White House staff members to announce the new plan until the other six summit leaders had agreed to it. The result? The initiative was overshadowed by other issues on the last day of the summit and largely ignored.

The same fate befell another Bush initiative--on Latin America--two weeks earlier. The plan was to be released before the summit.

But when Bush announced his decision to favor a tax increase, the White House rushed ahead with the release of the Latin American plan the next day. Sununu, aides said, hoped to divert attention from the tax flap. Instead, Bush’s Latin plan was widely ignored.

“We’re not getting any kind of ride on our good stories,” said one dismayed White House aide. Sununu, he added, “just wants to do it his way.”

WHAT, BUSH TIRED? After nearly two weeks on the road, President Bush spent the weekend at Camp David. And for the first time in recent memory, he admitted in public to being tired.

After parrying reporters’ questions for a few minutes before leaving the White House on Friday, he finally begged off, saying, “Hey, I’m tired. Come on. And so are the rest of you guys. I can tell by the quality of the questions.”

“You’re actually tired?” a reporter asked incredulously of the 66-year-old chief executive, who seemed to think nothing of flying overnight to London, meeting there with allied leaders and then taking off about 30 hours later for a late-night flight to Houston.

“Yeah, I’m tired. I am tired,” Bush conceded.