Four years ago, I represented the republicans and wrote the pro-Bush opinion piece for my high school newspaper. Today, with most of a college career behind me, my ideology is somewhat more refined but not vastly different than it was in high school. However, as a moderate conservative, I will be voting not for Bush, but for John Kerry this November.
My posts on this blog from the past year or so help to explain my evolution from a Bush supporter to a Kerry supporter. Overall, the war in Iraq was just too big a blunder for this administration. I'm not 
saying what we did was wrong, it was how we did it. The terrorists committed a grave mistake on 9/11. Their destruction rallied the world around America like never before. Instead of 9/11 resulting in a United States vs. Al Qaeda construct, the terrorists were faced with a unified world determined to eradicate the haters of freedom and democracy. Our country was reaffirmed as the beacon of hope and liberty. The world sympathized with us when we were grieving, and proved its allegiance to our cause when we lead a truly multilateral force into Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan is on the road to democracy, having just completed their first ever popular elections. The terrorists in Afghanistan have been routed.
But George W. Bush didn't stop here. Sensing an opportunity long awaited, Bush heeded the words of his most extremist neoconservative advisers and hastily pushed for war in Iraq. Under false justifications, the president lead our country into a devastating conflict that has squandered the support of the world and turned many of our newest friends into new enemies. Two years later, over 1,000 of our soldiers are dead, 100,000 civilians in Iraq have been killed as a result of the war, suicide bombers and ever-increasing ranks of terrorists wreak daily havoc in Iraq, a recent stockpile of powerful Iraqi weaponry has gone missing, our once invincible military has been stretched so thin that rumors of the draft have entered into public discourse, and the UN and most of the world refuses to support Bush in our grand Iraqi experiment for freedom, mush less the global war on terrorism.
On the global scale, George W. Bush is a divider. As Thomas Friedman said today, "When U.S. policy makes such a profound lurch to the right, when we start exporting fear instead of hope, the whole center of gravity of the world is affected." Right now, the enormous costs we are single-handedly bearing to keep Iraq afloat are negatively affecting our ability to pay for other important programs here at home...like homeland security efforts. With that said, the Iraqi effort must not be abandoned. We must get the job done, but to do that, we need a president who is a uniter in world affairs. We need a president who can bring our allies back to the table and help us with the enormous burden in Iraq. We need a president who will recast the war on terrorism as a global war rather than a U.S. vs. the terrorists struggle.
John Kerry is not a perfect candidate. On domestic issues such as the economy, I have major problems with John Kerry's liberal ideology. But I know that the Republican congress will keep Kerry in check and maintain moderate policy for the next four years. On the other hand, with a Republican majority in Congress and a fresh new mandate, George W. Bush can only be expected to become more extreme should he win this election. In today's interconnected world, John Kerry will better understand that in order to survive and prosper, one must be a uniter and not a divider. It is for that reason that I’ll be voting for John Kerry on November 2nd.
Recent Comments