That's the goal, anyway, and some elected officials do. I think many in the current administration do, but so do some Dems, such as Joe L. But many in both parties don't. They look at the short term of self interest-- election, money, and power for election, money, and power's sake, seeing the political opponents as the enemy. It does get discouraging sometimes.

As far as the bigger picture goes, the notion of looking at it implies that we really know what we're looking at. It seems to me that Anonymous' point is that both we and our leaders do not know what we are looking at, largely because we take our own values for granted and act as if there were no alternative points of view.

This results in a view of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and Islamic insurgency that has all the depth and subtlety of the average editorial cartoon. And in this matter our leaders largely appear to me to be no wiser than we are. I think Anonymous would agree.

As far as "the wishes of the people" goes, I would argue that most Americans have no wishes whatsoever about the rest of the world other than the wish that "terrorism" would go away and the wish to eradicate it by force if it doesn't. The details of our foreign policy occur largely by Presidential fiat.

Consider, for example, what I think was by far the greatest foreign policy blunder of the post 9/11 era: George Bush suddenly declaring his support (taking everybody by surprise) for a separate Palestinian state. There was no basis whatever in the "will of the people" for this, and I strongly suspect that it torpedoed the entire peace process. I also stongly suspect that it came from the above mentioned ignorance looking at the bigger picture.

In the current case, no explanation of why we are doing what we are doing ("fighting terrorism", "hunting Osama", "eradicating weapons of mass destruction", "spreading democracy through the Muslim world") lasts long enough to take seriously as a basis for policy and I frankly don't think that the current President is any clearer about what he wants from the world than the average American voter.

And as far as the "best interests of the citizenry" are concerned--there is little, if any, consensus in this country at the moment about what that might be in either the foreign or the domestic sphere. The whole notion is, in frank fact, the major ideological football of our politics.

As long as our leaders act, without consulting us, as if our best interests were identical with those of the Israeli Knesset or the House of Saud, we are hardly likely to come to such a consensus no matter who "wins" the election.

In other words, our policy generally is opportunist and incoherant. We are facing a very coherant ememy and we are largely not bright enough to realize how clear and coherant his point of view is in comparison to our own.

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