The election season is always hellish for people who fancy that they live by political principles, because 'politics' becomes, even more than usually, a matter of showbusiness and superficial calculation. Ever since 1980, when I bet the liberals of New York that Ronald Reagan would win easily (and didn't have to buy my own lunch for months afterward), I have sympathised with the prisoners' dilemma facing liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term 'lesser evil' was evolved to deal with this very trap.

Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don't really believe? Is it time for that deep-breath, third-party vote, or angry abstention of the sort that has tortured some Americans since they just couldn't take Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon?

Absent from this triangular calculation is the irony of history. Does anyone really, deeply wish that Jimmy Carter had been re-elected, or that Michael Dukakis had won? Implicit in the desire of the prisoner to escape is the banal, unexciting assumption of America's two-party oligopoly: sometimes it's not so bad that 'the other' party actually wins. Thus I ought to begin by stating my reasons to hope for victory by John Kerry and John Edwards.

Given my underlying stipulation - that this is a single-issue election and that that is a good and necessary thing - I have no formal quarrel with the Kerry/Edwards platform. It ostensibly calls for military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad. It does not shade the moral distinction that has to be made between 'our' imperfect civilisation and those who want to turn Islamic society into a medieval, lethal dust bowl.

The Kerry camp rightly excoriates the President and his cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.

I can't wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and 'at home' (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn't broken out 'at home'). I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and a better-organised foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi's existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error on America's part.

I notice that, given the ambivalent evidence about Saddam's weaponry, Kerry had the fortitude to make the presumption of guilt rather than innocence. I assume he has already discerned the difference between criticising the absence of postwar planning and criticising the presence of an anti-Saddam plan to begin with. In other words, I look forward to the assumption of his responsibility.

Should the electors decide for Bush, as I would slightly prefer, his excruciating personality strikes me as a second, or third, order consideration. If the worst to be said of him is true - that he is an idiotic Sabbath fanatic with nothing between his large Texan ears - that, presumably, was just as true when he ran against Al Gore and against nation-building and foreign intervention.

It is Bush's conversion from isolationism that impresses me, just as it is the lapse into isolationism on Kerry's part that makes me sceptical.

Don't like 'the smirking' of Bush? What about the endless smirks about the administration's difficulties, whether genuine or self-imposed? The all-knowing smirks about 'the secular' Saddam, or the innocuousness of prewar Iraq?

The sneers about the astonishing success of our forces in Afghanistan, who are now hypocritically praised by many who opposed their initial deployment? This is to say nothing of the innuendos that are now part of pseudo-radical rumour-mongering and defamation.

Whoever wins, I shall live to see these smirks banished, at least.

I can visualise a Kerry victory and can claim to have written one of the earliest essays calling attention to the merits of John Edwards. What slightly disturbs me is the liberal refusal to admit the consequences of 'Anybody But Bush', now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right.

The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. Actually, it's nihilism at best. If it isn't treason to the country - let us not go there - it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.

I was asked if I would also say something here about my personal evolution. I took that to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the stupid British Conservative Party, to the mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen. I am glad to have seen the day when a Tory leader is repudiated by the White House. An irony of history is when Republicans are willing to risk a dangerous confrontation with an untenable status quo. I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause.

In Kabul recently I interviewed Masuda Jalal, a brave Afghan physician who was now able to run for the presidency. I asked her about her support for the intervention in Iraq. 'For us,' she said, 'the battle against terrorism and against dictatorship are the same thing.' I dare you to smirk at such simple-mindedness as that.

I could take refuge in saying that I was a Blair supporter rather than a Bush endorser, and I am a member of a small international regime-change left[-wing] that originates in solidarity with our embattled brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq, who have received zero support from the American 'anti-war' movement. I won't even consider any reconsideration, at least until Islamist websites start posting items that ask themselves, and not us: can we go on taking such casualties? Have our tactics been too hideous and stupid? Only then can anything like a negotiation begin.

The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect, has been able to say repeatedly the essential thing: that we are involved in this war without apology and without remorse.

He should go further and admit the possibility of defeat, which might concentrate a few minds, while abjuring any notion of capitulation. Kerry is also capable of saying this, but not without cheapening it or qualifying it, so that he is offering you the worst of both worlds.

I have made my own escape from self-imposed quandary. Once you have done it, there's no going back. I have met a few other former hostages, and they all agree that the relief is unbelievable.