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Some thoughts in return:
1) In deciding who to vote for, you can't always ignore the probability of a candidate winning. For the slice of people who would normally vote for a minor party's offering, but who think one candidate is sufficiently bad that they'd be willing to live with the opponent, it's more sensible to vote for the major-party opponent.
2) Part of the nature of the US two-party system stems from institutional barriers to third parties, which are annoying.
3) A common American perception is that we have two centrist parties, each a bit to one side of the spectrum, and Europe has political parties that mostly stretch across the entire left end of the spectrum (aside from scary neo-fascist outliers). It's not immediately obvious how either the American or European perception is authoritative.
4) The "select few" in the US who authorized the Iraqi invasion were the overwhelming majority of Congress, which is elected from every state (for the Senate) and every district in each of those states (for the House of Representatives). What you're questioning is representative democracy. While the technology may be available for a nationwide direct democracy, I have to wonder, considering how few people vote now, how many people would bother voting on every single federal law and decision. And even if most people did vote, you're back to your first complaint - that your single vote doesn't matter much.
5) My personal answer to the problem is to minimize the number of things in one's life that must come up for a vote. The more things that are considered one's own business or an otherwise private or private-sector matter, the more you get to decide these matters for yourself, without hoping that 50% + 1 people in some pool agree with you.
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" The US people didn't vote to go to war in Iraq, nor did the Dutch people vote to support the US."
I disagree. In any case, if Bush is reelected his decision to go to war gets a mandate, no?
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You vote for a person or party; what they do after they win the election is up to them and cannot be influenced (much). A president's reelection does not necessarily mean that voters approve of certain decisions he made during his administration. Especially if there is no reasonable alternative to choose. (If Joe is a Republican, but doesn't agree with the war for whatever reason, is he going to vote for Kerry? Probably not.)
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IMO, one major reason that much of congress voted for the Iraq war was that they viewed the 2002 elections (where Republicans made big gains - and this was a big stumping issue for them) as a mandate for war with Iraq.