The grays, the shadows, the mysterious webs of murder, deception and corruption, the morally ambiguous characters.

But I never expected to see a noir shadow fall on the white marble hive of Washington.

The film noir hero, as Nicholas Christopher wrote, descends "into an underworld, on a spiral." The object of his quest "is elusive," and he is beset "by agents of a larger design of which he is only dimly aware."

George W. Bush began as a president of simple precepts of right and wrong, a leader who predicted his major foreign affairs challenges would be Russia and China. He has suddenly been drawn into a murky labyrinth from the caves of Central Asia to the casbahs of the Middle East, where he must trade in global grays to win strategic advantages.

Our capital is clammy, paranoid about what comes next, how we should combat enemies we can't easily locate, detect or vanquish, who may use tactics and weapons against which we have little protection. We are in Blair Witch territory, letting our imaginations filigree the unknown and unseen, bracing for the next terrible thing.

Embarrassed by their impotence in stopping the Sept. 11 attack, the freaked-out F.B.I. and C.I.A. now cover themselves by issuing blanket warnings, telling Congress there is a strong chance America will be attacked again by Islamic sleeper agents once we retaliate against Osama bin Laden, and revealing to CNN that they are picking up the same patterns and language; "You will be happy soon"; from terrorists under surveillance that were prevalent before Sept. 11.

Washingtonians, jumpy about germs and gases, are creating safe rooms in their houses, meeting with security experts and clearing out pharmacies of antibiotics.

There were other echoes of Israeli- style precautions: at the Capitol and the Supreme Court, they were putting protective film on windows. In the subway, they were removing trashcans and recycling bins.

Senators who yawned at bioterrorism warnings before the attack are falling all over each other to hold hearings on the subject. But their Chicken Little Come Lately cries do not reassure us that the bureaucratic rivalries and lapses in immigration and airline security that contributed to the monumental intelligence failure won't happen again. And they can't tell the public what it most yearns to hear: that we are not still just as vulnerable to another attack.

Sept. 11 was a day of crystalline certainty. Thousands of innocent people were dead. We had to find the murderers and unleash hell.

But after that things got weirdly muddied. We would have been prepared for a conventional war outside our borders. But we were not prepared for the terrorists' unconventional war inside our heads. We went from never imagining the damage the barbarians inside our gates could do to imagining little else.

America always needs to demonize the enemy, so we personalized our war around Osama bin Laden. But his network of evil wears no uniform. His soldiers dress in our clothes, sleep at the Comfort Inn, eat at Pizza Hut and shop at Wal-Mart.

At his Senate confirmation hearings to be Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld talked about the lessons of Vietnam. "Let's try not to get into things we can't get out of," he said. "Let's try not to get into things we can't finish well."

The last thing this country wanted was to be pulled into another hostile, unfamiliar landscape or more political quicksand. Even in our national discourse we rejected ambiguities, preferring the thumbs up-thumbs down, who's in-who's out, box office winner-box office loser sureties.

But now we're enmeshed in ambiguity. First we wanted to bomb Afghanistan. Then, when we saw the suffering of the people there, we wanted to send food. Now we may bomb them with missiles and care packages.

President Bush is struggling with geopolitical jujitsu. Our old enemy Russia is our new ally. Our old ally Israel is accusing us of appeasing the Arabs. We have to now trust countries we distrusted, like Pakistan. We have to hand out bribes and play footsie with those who tolerated and sheltered and exported terrorists, and may do again.

Our desire for justice remains unambiguous. Beyond that, as Keats wrote, "there is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."

(The New York Times Syndicate - October 7, 2001)