Power Failure : Even Washington ‘Insiders’ Are in the Dark About What’s Going to Happen Next in the Persian Gulf

This is a city where everybody acts as though everybody else has a national security clearance. But insiders feel like outsiders--and, as the Persian Gulf crisis peaks, that has made the mood in Washington both dark and desperate.

Now there is what George Bush wants and what Saddam Hussein will do, and any information that radiates beyond them is being tightly held by a select few, leaving the power elite walled out from events and circumstances. The people who make this place work say they feel impotent, disenfranchised--and frantic to know what will happen next. The world is not in their hands, but in the hands of someone nobody here understands.

“It’s driving everyone inside the Beltway crazy,” said one top Republican known for being well-connected to the White House. “There’s total unpredictability.”

Inner sanctums at places like the Pentagon and the State Department feel more like outer sanctums. Think-tank gurus are shrugging more and assuredly nodding less in national television appearances. Military analysts, awash in white papers and computer printouts, are throwing around casualty estimates, but the game is more like three-card monte than a round of Risk.

“What would you take?” one policy analyst asked another at a recent brunch in a Washington suburb as they smeared pate on their pita bread. “Ten thousand, 20,000 dead? What would you take?”

Such surrealism may be part of war, but elected officials in Washington are not so cavalier, knowing there is blood in their “yes” or “no” votes. As they grope for information, they seem fearful of the political consequences of answers that have to do with human costs. Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) recalled two funerals he attended on the same day in 1983--one for a Navy SEAL killed in the invasion of Grenada, the other for a Marine who died in the bombing of U.S. military barracks in Beirut.

“There was nothing I could say or do that made any difference,” said Downey, who was among the minority in the House that voted Saturday against authorizing war in the gulf. “Those parents were inconsolable.”

Yet it seems Congress might have been less divided over the war vote if members could have been assured that it was just a tool of brinkmanship. Behind closed doors before the vote, Democratic congressmen agonized, searching for insights and information that would convince them that supporting President Bush on this one was right.

Here is how one congressman described the closed session: “First, everybody stood up and made statements like ‘I’ve been here 25 years,’ or ‘I’ve been here 30 years, and this may be the most important vote I’ll ever cast, and I want it to be right.’ Then they listened to people like (Reps.) Lee Hamilton and Les Aspin and Steve Solarz attempt to crystallize the debate. It was the first time I saw so many members seated, really attentive, listening. . . .”

Journalists, almost always central to what happens inside the loop of government and politics, have been equally tense, unsure, torn and hungry to understand what is happening.

One frenzied reporter called a Senate aide the night before the vote Saturday and begged him to put her in touch with an “articulate, undecided senator--I don’t care if he’s a Democrat or Republican, as long as he knows how to talk and I can get to him fast, right now . . . .,” according to the aide, who was able to deliver.

And at the same time reporters are straining to get the story--When will the war begin? How do we know when it’s over? What is victory? Will Saddam Hussein talk? And they are worrying if they’re too flabby to go to the front.

The Pentagon’s requirement that reporters on the battlefield be able to run 1.5 miles in 17 minutes sent one high-gloss scribe into a frenzy, saying: “I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it, which in this case it would. I’d rather be on the front lines in Washington, battling to figure out what is going on.”

What that means these days is trying to get to George Bush and about a dozen people around him. One insider, Pete Teeley, says frankly he “knows what’s going on, but I ain’t gonna tell ya.”

A longtime friend of Bush, Teeley gets scores of inquiries daily about the high-stakes drama unfolding in the Oval Office but will say little except that “the leadership is comfortable but not cocky about the track they are on.”

Instead, Teeley talks a blue streak about the frustrations of Bush watchers who mainline tidbits of gossip but who are going through withdrawal these days because almost no one is in the know.

“This is a great town,” he said, “because it lives on gossip and rumor and a network in which everybody talks to each other, lies to each other about what they do and do not know.”

But for once, he added, Washington has been sobered up: “This is different. Everybody inside the Beltway is very serious because if there is war--and by the way, these days it is not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when’--there are going to be repercussions, politically, economically and personally, for years to come.”

In the past, Washington insiders have made the mistake of thinking war would be a snap.

During the Civil War, junketing politicians from Washington went out during the Battle of Bull Run to watch the army they had expected to reunite the Union in a walk. Instead, they were sent scampering back across the Potomac when their soldiers were routed and forced to retreat past them.

Now, there is no such self-assurance as there was at Bull Run. Even among the 20,000 people who work at the Pentagon, there is doubt. Two high-ranking officials--one from the Marines, the other from the Army--separately described the Pentagon mood as “apprehensive” and “gloomy.”

“All of us know a small slice of what’s going on,” said the Marine. “Beyond that, there’s just this feeling that this thing is really rolling along, and there are a lot of allusions to the summer of 1914 (before World War I). . . . But there are very few people who are really well-informed of the whole picture.”

The Army man described a similar circumstance: At the daily 7:30 a.m. briefing, the Army leadership is in a “go/no-go” mode, he said--but no one knows which one it will be.

He said the Army high command--all men in their late 40s or early 50s, all Vietnam veterans--has a “personal interest” in the outcome of a gulf war, adding: “A lot of these guys have sons and daughters in Saudi Arabia in various capacities, which puts them on edge for a number of reasons.”

But this past weekend, the briefing was canceled. “We’ve done everything we can to get men and equipment over there,” the Army man said. “There’s not much else we can do than wait for word.”