An undecided voter decides

This undecided voter has made up her mind. I'm swallowing hard and voting for Kerry. If I had to give a one-word answer why, it would be "ACCOUNTABILITY." Namely, the Bush Administration's lack thereof.

There is no point in bringing democracy to other countries if we're sacrificing it here. I have read and pondered many, many arguments pro and con both candidates, most impressively Greg Djerejian's queasy endorsement of Bush on The Belgravia Dispatch and the scores of responses that follow. My conclusive impression is that the people who are supporting Bush on the grounds that he's tougher and more resolute are very frightened. That means that the terrorists have already achieved their objective: they have terrified some of the best and brightest of us. To my mind, to vote for Bush -- despite admitted disgust with his botching of the post-war in Iraq and his overstretching of both our military and our budget -- is to vote out of terror. And that is, paradoxically, to hand the terrorists victory. To lurch into war in a counterphobic but ill-considered display of our toughness is actually to display our weakness, and to make ourselves factually weaker.

I wish Kerry were a better candidate, but I find the Bush administration's defensive certainty, paranoid insistence on uncritical loyalty, secrecy and self-isolation and imperviousness to advice, more frightening than I find another terrorist attack. Yes, you heard me. I live in Manhattan, which is probably Target One because it's the financial and symbolic nerve center of the U.S. That means I might not survive the next one. If I feel at all safer, it's not because of any gross show of force (everybody already knew we had far more high-tech firepower than any other nation), but because of the intelligence work and international cooperation and strategic bribery (aka "rewards") that caught people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. What would make me feel safer yet would be better port and chemical plant security and, above all, serious work on the problem of loose nukes. I see no reason to doubt that Kerry will pursue these less showy but more pertinent strategies.

Iraq? Sure, bringing democracy to the Middle East is a noble goal that would also make us safer. But the neocons and Rumsfeld so drastically underestimated the difficulty of delivering it at gunpoint that they have made the task far more difficult, resisted and prolonged than it would have been had they assessed it realistically in the first place. And no one is held accountable for the waste of blood and treasure, or for the betrayal of our proud values that was Abu Ghraib* -- on the excuse of a united front. Accountability is equated with irresolution. I believe we now must stay the course, both because we owe it to the Iraqis and because if we failed, Iraq would truly become the haven for terrorists the Bush administration claimed it was. But I also believe this would be obvious to any president -- even John Kerry. (It's long forgotten that even supposed "peacenik" Howard Dean, no Dennis Kucinich, insisted we had to stay and keep our promises.)

The hard truth is that nothing and no one is now going to make us perfectly safe. A show of reckless toughness, a "confidence" that brooks no challenge, may make us feel more comforted and safe, but that is an emotional and even childish choice. True freedom involves a measure of uncertainty. We seem ready to give up some of our own freedom, and some of our responsibility as free citizens for holding our government accountable, in return for an illusion of certainty. Do we really scare that easily? How soft we are. I'm not voting for the dream of a daddy. I don't expect to sleep well again in my lifetime. I want to stay awake.

- amba

*Andrew Sullivan: "To be involved in such a vital struggle and through a mixture of negligence and arrogance to have facilitated such a fantastic propaganda victory for the enemy is just unforgivable."

Comments

[AndrewBB]

Thank you. Good reasoning all around. What took you so long?

(here via Oxblog, via Washington Post blog awards)