We have representative government for a reason.

We teach children in our schools to have and express opinions. We don't seem to teach them to defer to people who have better knowledge and understanding when decisions have to be made. Indeed our media also (perhaps inadvertently)  present talking heads who we are to listen to because of their ability to express their opinions forcefully rather than because of their deep knowledge and understanding of the issues under discussion (and of related factors and issues).

I was involved in sector analysis to improve USAID loans for a number of years. Generally we took a small team working for several months to provide knowledge and understanding on which to base a loan. We did so for loans in the health sector and for science and technology. I also was responsible for the sector analysis program in the Latin American Bureau of USAID which was doing longer range analyses in agriculture, education and health sectors. I was involved in the creation of health and science and technology policies for the World Bank, and in international health and international hunget policies for the United States working out of the White House.

The teams I worked with in these exercises were trained to the doctorate or post doctorate level, with many years of experience. Usually they were multinational. Indeed, I was fortunate enough to put together international teams to work with comparably experienced national teams in some circumstances. Thus we could bring insights from abroad to the "feel" and understanding of nationals. (I have observed that sometimes outsiders can recognize sources of blindness in insiders.)

I think there is a fair degree of wisdom in the phrase "you don't know what you don't know/" Often development assistance projects created out of inadequate knowledge and understanding run into problems that were unforeseen, but could have been predicted with a little more knowledge and understanding. I know of situations in which projects were successful because they avoided such traps.

I thought about the need to defer to the expert in making important decisions because President Obama has just deferred action in Syria to obtain the advice and consent of the Congress. Ours is a representative democracy. We elect representatives to make complex public policy decisions in our name, and provide them with the resources to obtain knowledge and understanding to do, and to obtain advice from experts.

While it is incumbent upon our legislators to attend to public opinion, they should be better informed and more thoughtful about the issues before they vote on issues of public policy than is the average citizen responding to a public opinion poll or writing to his/her Congressional Representative.

The average citizen, unfortunately, knows almost nothing about Syria and the civil war there -- understands almost nothing. Unfortunately, the same is true of many of the members of our House of Representatives and our Senate. I hope that before the debate and voting in the Congress, our representatives will take the time and make the effort to inform themselves, especially of expert opinion. The President at least has the advice of the Departments of State and Defense and the professional intelligence community, based on evidence much of which is not available to the rest of us. Opposition to his informed opinion by people in Congress should be tempered by a willingness to defer if the representative is not well enough informed to debate the decision.

The votes of our Congressmen and Senators on Syria will be recorded for posterity within  a couple of weeks. If they oppose intervention and are wrong, and the vote leads to North Korea, Iran, or other countries using poison gas, or the vote leads to governments providing poison gas to terrorists, then we can and should vote them out of office. If they support intervention and are wrong, and the limited action proposed by President Obama drags us into more and more involvement in military action in Syria, then we can and should vote them out of office.

But lets demand that our representatives vote on the basis of knowledge and understanding, and defer our relatively uninformed opinions to their better informed votes. That is what representative government means.