If you have a conscience and a brain, this war is slowly but surely driving you off the deep end. In this most morally complex and ambiguous of conflicts, every judgment, attitude or emotion quickly turns into its opposite. Everything is conditional: from the beginning, long before the first bomb fell, what one should think about this war, from its concept to its reality, has been predicated not on the present, but on the future. This is a strained and frustrating and agnostic and deeply odd state of affairs. And for many of us who oppose the war, it has induced what almost might be called a kind of moral schizophrenia.

Actually, not everything is ambiguous. One thing at least is clear: post-invasion Iraq is not likely to be a worse place than it was under Saddam. This is not to say it will necessarily be pretty: to take just one example, the news that two rival Shiite clerics were hacked to death on Thursday at one of Islam's holiest shrines is ominous. But short of a total collapse into ethnic cleansing and anarchy, it's hard to argue that whatever comes next will be as bad as Saddam's rule: It was simply too dreadful.

The larger question of the effect of the war on the region, America, and the world, however, is less clear-cut. And it is doubts about this question that have led many of us who oppose the war to that confused state of moral schizophrenia.

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. If this is true, then it would be better for bad things to happen to Bush. But who knows for sure that it is true? Perhaps pro-war leftist Christopher Hitchens was right when he spoke of the "cunning of history" -- perhaps the genius of Historical Progress chose Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz to be its unlikely instruments. Dialectical pessimism is the dirty little secret of the antiwar camp -- dirty because there is something distasteful about wishing for bad outcomes when the future on which those wishes are based is unknown.

I say that knowing that I will probably find myself going around in circles on this issue again.

It is possible that we who celebrate today will be forced to recant tomorrow. But that should not stop us. Nor should it be our concern. Those who opposed this war in part because they feared what it would do to the Iraqi people must now make every effort to protect and raise up those people. And to do that, they must pay attention to what is happening to them -- the good, the bad and the in-between. This is the most compelling reason to celebrate the end of Saddam. Call that celebration a leap of faith, if you will -- but you could also call it a binding contract, American to Iraqi, human heart to human heart. We smashed your country and we killed your people and we freed you from a monster: We are bound together now by blood. We owe each other, but we owe you more because we are stronger and because we came into your country.

The left's role, now, must be to make sure that debt is paid.

In another piece from "Resistance, Rebellion and Death," "Letters to a German Friend," Camus wrote the following dialogue. "I told you, 'I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.' You retorted, 'Well, you don't love your country.'

... "When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation. No, I didn't love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving."

America has embarked upon the riskiest, most dangerous gamble imaginable -- and the risks of the war are small compared to those that are just beginning. There are many reasons to believe that the men who run our country desire the "greatness born of blood and falsehood." But if we measure up to our finest image, if we steer our course away from injustice and reject imperial hubris, if we rebuild Iraq with the world's help and without favor or self-interest, there is a chance that Camus' ringing words, written as Paris was liberated, will apply not just to the City of Light, but to the cradle of civilization.

" ... despite the suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of those isolated with their fate.

"This huge Paris, all black and warm in the summer night, with a storm of bombers overhead and a storm of snipers in the streets, seems to us more brightly lighted than the city of Light the whole world used to envy us. It is bursting with all the fires of hope and suffering, it has the flame of lucid courage and all the glow, not only of liberation, but of tomorrow's liberty."

Let it be so in Iraq -- and let us all work to make it so.

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