Election frustration

We all know that we are not told enough valid information for us as individuals to have an opinion on political matters. Bush told us that war in Iraq was necessary because"they" had "weapons of mass destruction". What other information did we have?

Do we think we have more information about the war in Afghanistan? Do we think that opium/heroin has anything to do with it? and if so, what? How are we supposed to have a valid opinion when we are not given information that is worth a fart in a windstorm?

That's why we have a representative government, rather than a true democracy. We vote for people that we have to trust to get all the information, even the information that is not available to us, so that they can vote as they think we would want them to. That's the theory. What's the checks-and-balances on this system? We have no way of knowing whether they voted in a way that represented their constituency. Essentially we have to trust them, trust the integrity, honor and sense of duty of our elected representatives.

Do other people have the same failure of trust that I do? If so, the problem is not a simple one, one in which electing different people will solve it. The problem is that there is no way to know whether a politician is voting as he believes we would vote if we had all the facts. We have to guess from outcomes and newspaper/tv articles.

So, what have we accomplished in Iran? Do we honestly believe that we can impose a representative and democratic government on people who want to follow religious leaders blindly? In the last 2000 or 3000 years, how many democratic governments have there been?
Particularly in the middle East, which in most relevant ways is still peopled by tribes battling for territory and water rights, where national boundaries are relatively recent and still relatively unimportant, where a winning tribe celebrates by killing as many as possible of the losing tribe, where there are no rights for those not members of your group, it is impossible to see how representative government would work. It doesn't even work that well here. And what gives us the right to try to impose our form of government on people who are not interested in democracy? What do we care what form of government they have?

The answer has to be that fighting for "democratic governments" in the middle East is the same as fighting against "weapons of mass destruction" in the Middle East. That's not why we're there, it's just why we're TOLD we're there. How much faith do we have that the secret reasons we are in the middle east and Afghanistan are good and valid? It's not so much that our leaders lie to us. There are probably good tactical and strategic reasons for doing that. It's that without ever, even eventually, knowing the REAL reasons, we can't decide whether our elected leaders are doing right or not.

I no longer believe that national elections serve a useful purpose. Changing from one set of dishonest and corrupt politicians to another is only marginally better than keeping the original group. Representative government is purely and simply an act of faith, and I seem to be in increasingly short supply of that item.