Original post by CopperknickersThis is all very nice but totally irrelevant to the point we were discussing: the lack of accountability of governments for their foreign policy actions, resulting in an opaque and unchecked political environment which is wide open to abuse of power. And it's not enough to say 'that's how representative democracies work'. Democracy is only one element of the systems in place to protect those who need protecting and it is not given free reign.
As you rightly say, people tend to vote for their own interests, and conversely, different interests are catered for by different political parties according to the share of the electorate they can draw out to vote for them. Democracy was invented, we must remember, because previous to democracy, power rested in the hands of an elite minority who would uphold their own interests at the expense of everyone else. In a functioning democracy however, in theory at least, no minority can cater for solely its own interests and expect to be elected by a majority: all political parties must fight to try and win over a majority.
However, this creates a new problem: a situation where you have a 'tyranny of the majority', where minorities are drowned out. Democracy solves the problem of 'tyranny by minority', to an extent (not totally, bearing in mind the strange ability of some modern political parties to convince people to vote against their own interests with cons such as trickle-down economics and thus hand power back to the aristocratic minority voluntarily) but it isn't a magic wand which can guarantee freedom and protection for all. In order to protect minorities from the dangers of democracy, we must put in place some restrictions on it: the most obvious example of this is human rights. Human rights (as demonstrated by the frantic attempts of the Tory elite to scrap the European Human Rights Act) are a major damper on corruption and tyranny, because they mean that no matter how many people vote to infringe minority rights (or are misled into giving power to people who want to do so) this infringement will not succeed.
The key here is having an independent judiciary which acts as a check on the power of the elected government: human rights are enshrined in law which is difficult to change (nigh impossible in countries like the USA where there is a legally binding written constitution). There are numerous other legal provisions designed to protect minorities which are designed partially to check unrestricted democracy. In the UK we also have constitutional protections against tyranny and corruption, such as the House of Lords, and independent regulatory bodies such as the independent police complaints commission, and the council that was recently set up to decide on MPs' pay. There are many others.
The problem is that we don't really have an effective regulatory system as regards foreign affairs, i.e. a system which protects those in other countries and not just our own citizens. All there is is the famously useless UN and the Geneva Conventions (and the EU, soon to be minus Britain, of course). And so the British government has free reign to cause or enable suffering and misery outside of British borders, even to its own citizens.
And so we need a solution to this problem. Since the people of Afghanistan and Syria who are actually affected by our foreign policy decisions don't get to vote in American and British elections, there is a situation one might call 'destruction without representation', not that allowing them to vote would help since they would still be a minority of the electorate. Anyhow, even if this were not true, the problem would remain that democracy functions within a world made up of nation states enshrined with Westphalian sovereignty. But that's an issue for another day.
And so we have three options. Firstly, extend the vote on British foreign affairs to the people our decisions actually affect. Not very realistic. Secondly, try and get democracy to police foreign affairs: well, it's a little unrealistic to expect democracy itself to act as a check on foreign policy excesses, when people aren't likely to vote in the interests of other people if it impacts themselves in any way, and indeed they might actively choose to inflict tyranny on others for various reasons, hence why we restrict democracy so much already as I showed above. A benevolent democracy is about as realistic as benevolent dictatorship, although through education and international bridge-building we can make some steps towards it. And finally, we can restrict the actions of individual countries and their governments (democratically elected or not) on a global scale. I.e., create a functioning UN, similar to a kind of global EU.
Anyway we are getting a little off-topic. All we (by which I mean 'they', the people of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and those of us who care for their welfare) have, for the timebeing, is activists who refuse to allow the West to forget the crimes our governments are able to carry out overseas. And given the gravity of the problem, I say again that we must take every opportunity to remind people that the tragedy of 9/11 was exploited as a tool by people wishing not only to callously slaughter their way to wealth and power, but also to sow the seeds of fear back home, in order to further exploit the opportunities which that gives them (everything from unfettered snooping in our online lives, to division and conquest of their political opponents through manufactured polarisation of the political discourse).
Lack of accountability in foreign wars is a gaping hole in the government system of our country, and if the hole is left unplugged, the fetid sludge of corruption and abuse will, like an oil slick, ensnare first the innocents of Syria like seabirds, and then ourselves.