We surely hope not.  Please read my offering in “September 11”, with the same title.  In addition, the following are bottom-line statements which, in my opinion, should by now be recognized as fact by all informed and fair-minded observers of that tragic and dangerous mess.  Further debate on these points I will leave to the many “talking heads” on TV, and to those who - in the term used to describe the tobacco industry’s defense of nicotine against all facts - have become “dissembling miscreants”.

• The “War on Terrorism” on which the United States has correctly embarked, and which has been  outrageously equated with current actions in the Middle East,  cannot be waged effectively, and certainly cannot be won, without resolution of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict as the threshold issue.  The entire Arab world has made that abundantly clear.
• The issue of land must be resolved by partition: universal recognition and guarantee of the State of Israel, but not the Israel of the Bible; universal recognition and guarantee of the State of Palestine including Gaza and the entire West Bank, shorn of all Jewish settlements - which were a terrible and provocative idea from the beginning; acceptance by all concerned - especially the bordering Arab nations who have been unwilling to accept reality - that there can be no “right of return” of Palestinian refugees...just a right of compensation.
• The issue of Jerusalem should be left to further negotiation by all concerned, leading either to partition or preferably to an “open city” in recognition of one world “Under God”.
• Renouncement by all, parties and interested parties,  of war or terror as a legitimate instrument of resolution of related problems in that area, subject to the right of self-defense and subject to the commitment of the United Nations and the United States to intervene to stop any future violence and to punish any violators of that international rule.

Correct!  That solution will have to be imposed, and the sooner the better.  And the United States, as the only super-power in the world today, must spearhead the action, already endorsed by the Security Council of the U.N.

GS