Gloom smothers Rumsfeldian hard-liners at the Pentagon, while euphoria lofts Powellites at the State Department. Those are the visible but puzzling outcomes of President Bush’s successful campaign to get Congress and the United Nations to order Iraq to disarm or else. Why isn’t it the other way round?

With the gun on the table, Iraq finally indicated Wednesday it would admit U.N. weapons inspectors as early as next week. That begins the countdown to the moment of truth Saddam Hussein has long postponed and ultimately to the regime change that Iraq needs. But hidden long-term issues of substance and ambition create skewed, misleading reactions to what is in fact a promising situation.

The long, often-bitter debate within the administration about going to the United Nations was never solely about Iraq. It was ” and is ” also about the determination of Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and, I would guess, the president to get control over civilian and military bureaucracies that routinely thwart or tilt policies they are supposed to implement.

This is a recurring struggle in Washington. But it is particularly intense in this administration and on this issue. The battle now runs through the competing scenarios describing the day after, the months after and the decade after the fall of Saddam that are being written in at least four different offices within the administration.

As you read incomplete accounts of the forward planning and positioning for and against provisional Iraqi governments and the like, never forget that most of these scenarios tilt inevitably toward the clients and interests of the bureaucracies writing them. The future of the Iraqi people is secondary to career and institutional imperatives for many in Washington.

Not surprisingly, the State Department, the CIA and others will not tell you that. This is a fight the president does not want to acknowledge, much less settle in public. It grinds on in the shadows of government behind the misleading public facade of who is, momentarily, up or down.

Another blurring factor is Bush’s confusing but effective style of ceding to Powell and the bureaucracy on procedure while eventually siding with Cheney and Rumsfeld on substance. Powell has it right when he says the U.N. deliberations and vote did not tie Bush’s hands ” unless, at the end of the day, Bush wants his hands tied.

The hawks, it is said, are depressed over losing wording battles in the consultations on the Security Council resolution. But that reaction misses two key points: Bush gave the Pentagon a significant role in drafting the resolution, despite State Department heartburn and obstruction. And Washington hung tough enough on inspection terms to make defiance by Saddam highly likely and highly lethal for him.

Powell did not set out to get the United States to the brink of war with Iraq. His program was to continue the Clinton administration’s policy of handling Saddam as a public relations problem: Ease economic sanctions on Iraq and show the Muslim world the United States is a good guy. End of story for Powell pre-Sept. 11, pre-war on terrorism.

Now Powell talks of Saddam as an urgent menace sure to slip out of his box if action is postponed again. I once incurred the secretary of state’s wrath by writing a soliloquy column that purported to sound like him. For the past two months on Iraq, Powell has sounded like me. I find no cause for gloom in that.

But beneath the surface, the battle continues. Cheney reportedly exploded recently when he found that the State Department and the CIA, aided by Senate staffers, had blocked a $4 million appropriation he favored to fund an intelligence collection program inside Iraq by dissident forces.

In bureaucratic terms, the program would have strengthened Rumsfeld’s hand in intelligence. It would have also helped the Iraqi National Congress, which the State Department and CIA fight in much the subterranean and spiteful way the United States opposed (and permanently alienated) Charles de Gaulle in World War II.

Two teams of eight CIA agents each, with translators, were recently inserted secretly into northern Iraq to work with the rival Kurdish forces of Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talibani. Washington policy-makers nominally insist on a united Iraqi opposition. But the agency is seeking to carve out Kurdistan as a separate fiefdom, free from Rumsfeldian influence.

That covert power play will have more impact on the day or the decade after than will theoretical scenarios about territorial unity and democracy in Iraq. George W. Bush is meeting the real U.S. government and finding out that ” Pogo to the contrary ” it is not him.

” Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.