I need to provide some personal history today so you'll know what I'm talking about.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

I am virtually a lifelong Republican, partly originating from the fact that my father was one of the few Republicans ever to hold city office in the small, Democratic, Ohio town I come from. My mother was always a Republican poll-watcher.

I cast my first vote for president in 1960, for Richard Nixon, for whom I voted altogether three times. I voted for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan twice, George H.W. Bush twice, and George W. Bush in 2000. Disgusted by Watergate and vaguely attracted by Jimmy Carter's throw-back, apparent rural cleanliness, I voted for him in 1976, and for Bill Clinton in 1996, repelled by Bob Dole. I generally vote a split ticket and am not an automatic anything, certainly not a Democrat.

As a career diplomat I worked for every American administration from Lyndon Johnson through George W. Bush, serving mostly overseas, in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, carrying out the foreign policy of whatever administration was in power. One does make foreign policy as well as carry it out, but I come from the old school of the U.S. Foreign Service that believes that the American people elect the government in power in Washington, it sets the policy, and you carry it out.

That, as a long prelude to saying that next Tuesday I will vote for John Kerry for president. I will do so with a long, family Republican background because, as a longtime foreign affairs professional I feel that George W. Bush has made an awful mess of U.S. policy.

That would be bad enough in itself but his actions in that area have also already killed more than 1,100 young American men and women in Iraq. But his reasons are even worse.

I believe that he came to office with the intention of transferring as much of America's wealth as possible into the hands of defense contractors such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton and the oil companies that were his background and remain his so-called "base." The result is a U.S. economy on the skids. The jobs situation is very bad, as we know especially well here in Western Pennsylvania. George W. Bush is the first American president since the Great Depression under whom our economy has slipped backward in creating jobs. The national debt -- our debt -- fueled by spending for his war and his budget deficit, has reached an inconceivable $7.4 trillion and continues to rise at $1.67 billion per day.

Bush's "base" is prospering, helped by tax cuts that are targeted to benefit the elite of our society, led by oil companies fat from what we are paying at the pump for gas and what we are about to pay for fuel this winter.

We are told that President Bush took us to war to assure America's national security. I do believe the old Vince Lombardi line that the best defense is a good offense. Put in national defense terms, there was solid wisdom to the United States carrying fire in Afghanistan to those who attacked us Sept. 11, seeking to put al-Qaida and the Taliban out of business.

But the Iraq war was something else. President Bush and his handlers did that for other reasons. They knew that the only way he could get the second term his father didn't get was by being able to call himself a war president when he ran in 2004. Otherwise, the American people would reject him, as they did his father in 1992, on the basis that he was the president of the rich, with no interest in or feeling for the ordinary people of this country -- the ones who work so hard for so little, the ones from small towns who are now dying at the rate of 55 per month in Iraq to reelect him president.

I have looked among all the other reasons that Bush's people have put forward for the United States to invade Iraq. None hold water.

Our own people have crawled all over the place now and found no weapons of mass destruction. I am particularly resentful at having been hooked by that argument. All I can say is that I was not used to being systematically lied to by an American government that was cooking the intelligence on the basis of which it was supposed to be making serious decisions, such as to go to war.

The al-Qaida-Iraq link claim was bogus. The idea of the United States bringing democracy to the Middle East was silly and a vicious hoax as well as arrogant. The idea that attacking Iraq would make Israel safer was false; instead the United States pounding Arabs in Iraq has become totally associated with Israelis pounding Palestinians in Gaza, increasing Arab and Muslim hatred of the United States and Israel, to the long-term disadvantage of the Jewish state.

Virtually all other aspects of U.S. foreign policy have been damaged by the Bush administration's total focus on Iraq. America's traditional allies for the most part want nothing to do with us.

My own experience overseas during this administration is that they hate President Bush. They don't hate Americans, and we can hope that with him gone, the alliances can be mended without too much effort. Foreign policy areas that have suffered from neglect include Iran, the Koreas, China, particularly Latin America, and, of course, Africa, except to drain its oil.

John Kerry can fix all of this. George Bush couldn't, even if he wanted to. So I am voting for Kerry. America can't live in this world with a busted foreign policy.