Capital Mood Mixes Anger, Resignation

Citizens and visitors here reacted with a mixture of anger, resignation and uncertain somberness Wednesday night as news of Operation Desert Storm swept a rain-drenched national capital.

“We had to do it, didn’t we?” said one grim-faced woman as she emerged from a downtown government office building, adding that she reluctantly supports the President.

But others were quick to disagree. “It’s going to be very, very bad for both countries,” said Syed Tariq, a 30-year-old Pakistani immigrant. “War is never, ever good--for anybody.”

Near the city’s fashionable Dupont Circle area just north of downtown, Raymond Loehr, a visiting scientist from the University of Texas at Austin, said he would have preferred to have seen the economic sanctions against Iraq be given more time.

“I would have liked to see some other pressures--rather than brute force,” Loehr said, suggesting that allies could have cut off the flow of the Tigris River, the main source of drinking water for the 4 million residents of Baghdad.

“I hope the President considered those types of options,” Loehr said.

His companion, Richard Conway, a University of West Virginia researcher, said he believed that Washington should have waited--even if for “a few days.”

Across from the White House, more than 100 placard-bearing demonstrators marched and chanted anti-war slogans in Lafayette Square as Washington police, many mounted on horseback, watched from nearby. Later, they moved in and began to arrest some of the demonstrators.

The streets of downtown Washington seemed unusually devoid of pedestrians, and several cab drivers confirmed that late-departing office workers appeared in a hurry to go home. The initial television reports of the U.S. bombing began airing before 7 p.m. local time.

Leaning against a fence at the Iraqi Embassy here was a crude sign made of cardboard that read: “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Saddam Hussein Has Got to Go.”

But that view was not widely shared by several passersby.

“Bombs have no eyes,” snapped Frances Boatswain, a 29-year-old immigrant from Trinidad. “Will there be anybody left in Iraq and Kuwait to ‘liberate’? It’s a waste of time. We’re all going to regret this.”

At a nearby bus stop, maintenance worker Matthew Wedge, 41, said he was stunned by news of the bombing. “I didn’t think there’d be a war,” said the District of Columbia resident. “Now nobody knows how it’s going to end.”