In a matter of days, Americans will begin greeting one another with well-meaning words. “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas,” they’ll say, but behind the facade of jubilation there will remain a nagging dismay, a cloud of uneasiness all over the country.

Not many of us are undivided these days; as a nation, we lack a sense of direction. The country is bogged down in a war in Iraq supposed to have been ended more than two years ago, when President Bush announced on the first of May 2003 that “major combat operations” were over. Yet the fighting and killing go on, and the number of dead Americans has surpassed 2,000, with no known end. U.S. Rep. John Murtha’s recent call for a quick withdrawal of U.S. troops got a lot of people thinking.

America has gone to war before. But seldom have we faced battles with such deep indecision. Once we got involved in Iraq, we discovered that the major reason for the invasion was nonexistent. No weapons of mass destruction, only very tenuous connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. And when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell quietly protested the war, he was moved outside the president’s inner circle – effectively fired. He was replaced by Condoleezza Rice, one of the president’s closest confidants, known to go along to get along.

About now, many of us aren’t sure what to think. Many feel we simply don’t know what’s going on in Washington – or worse, that we do. An administration that acts on invalid information from the CIA … that seems to value torture as a tool in certain circumstances. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that suspected members of al-Qaida and the Taliban “are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status.” Said Vice President Dick Cheney immediately after 9-11: “We have to work the dark side, if you will.”

It was left to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war himself, to argue against the use of torture as a tactic. McCain’s message: Abusive interrogation tactics give us nothing but bad intelligence, and they gut the values we say we uphold.

All is not related to the war. The economy isn’t exactly foundering … but we do see layoffs, bankruptcies and concern about the stability of General Motors and other industry giants. Oil-company profits have spiked, while home-heating fuel costs have doubled in some cases. The CEOs of the five major oil companies made no words over their whopping $32.8 billion third-quarter profits as consumers were forced to dig deeper into their pockets.

President Bush’s personal approval ratings, recently in the mid-30-percent range in some polls, have rallied only slightly (only 42 percent in a Fox News poll Thursday). Following government foot-dragging after Hurricane Katrina, the president stumbled ahead, nominating the unlikely Harriet Miers, his staff secretary and lawyer, to fill Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the Supreme Court. There was nearly total agreement that while Miers is a lovely person, she was hardly the one to fill O’Connor’s pivotal position on the conservative court. Miers found little support and had to step aside.

All of this has caused Americans to feel a bit shaky about what lies ahead for Bush – and for the nation. The president’s Social Security reform efforts never really got off the ground. Several other scandals are under way involving some of the president’s powerful allies, former House majority leader, Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and Senate Majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Neither will be of much help in reinventing Bush for the remainder of his administration. If the president is to prosper politically, he’ll have to make most of the adjustments himself. Even his trusted political manipulator, Karl Rove, may be hamstrung by the scandal involving the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA analyst, whose identity may have been disclosed by Rove and others around him.

It’s an uneasy holiday season. In our uneasiness, we may not be alone. What would be worse: a president who felt just as uneasy as we do – or a president who feels no unease? I know what I’d answer.

– Claude Lewis is a retired columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.