Malinvestments are a feature of systems that reward appearance and subjectivity over outcome and objectivity. We have become a sclerotic system of lawyers who write more legislation, MBAs who choke innovation + lack vision and kleptocrats who control the purse strings. Where is innovation going to come from, when everyone seems to be intent on destroying its first sprouts?

It certainly helps that a significant part of population still believes in these shysters and their secular religion.

Glenn Greenwald has written a couple of excellent pieces on the Yemeni situation, mainly about the pattern in which the United States tries to avoid calling attention to the civilian casualties that occur with just about every one of these episodes. At first there are always the falacious claims that some important Al Queda figure has been taken out, followed by his later emergence at another time, quite alive. Greenwald has documented innumerable instances of this official dissembling, all purposed to cover the excrescent side effects for which our government bears responsibility.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwa...

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwa...

Not sure whether Yemen is the next Afghanistan - Iran appears to hold those honors - but if it can be considered to be in any even vague way a threat to Israel, count on it becoming so. We have no Middle East policy that operates solely for our own interests and never will until the power of AIPAC together with its dispensationalist, ReichsChurch allies is broken. Tea Party as they may, this is one area that brownshirt, rightwing populism will not address. Budget deficits to send more poor white kids from the rural South into the Middle East as representatives of Israel and the armaments industries are just fine, thank you.