Well we could if there was a draft and WWII style taxation.

The question on my mind as I watched the collapse of the twin towers in law school commons area on 9/11/01 was on the nature of the response. Was 9/11 Pearl Harbor or not? How could it not be? How could the response be anything less than that. Might this evolve into an 'area' war instead of a micro war? Moreover, no one could tell. Moreover, only four months earlier we had had a stare down with China in the South China Sea. If you have an area war in South West Asia, might another war erupt in East Asia over Taiwan or Korea or both?

Shouldn't Bush, on the morrow of 9/11 call for the draft? I mean if you need to occupy entire nations a year an a half from 9/11 you have to call for a draft on 9/12 to ensure you have the boots to police occupied countries.

Yet Bush didn't call for a draft on 9/12. If ever it could have been done, it was on 9/12. My 72 year old father said to me, on 9/12 "it makes me want to join up. I wonder if they could use a mechanic?"

To me, the failure to not call for a draft on 9/12 was beguiling. It told me that they weren't really interested in getting to the bottom of things. And of course we now all know that they weren't. Bush was all about looting the country and destroying the remaining vestiges of the New Deal: the widespread middle class. That basically meant wrecking the country. And so he did.

In fact, we are now in a depression that suffers from lack of demand, just like back in the 1930s. Just like back then, the movement out of the depression is halfhearted. So the world is coming unglued once again during a depression.

A successful surgical response was most very responsible after 9/11 in Afganistan. But that ship has sailed.

The surgical response didn't work because the Bush administration did not care about Afghanistan, nor capturing Bin Laden, nor seeing to it that Afghanistan had a proper rebuilding effort and good leadership. Karzai is from the oil establishment - he's part of the legacy to push oil pipelines through the area. In other words, he's part of the Bush/Cheney-petrojunta.

The smart response would have been to build on Afghani institutions - the King was still alive and had immense legitimacy after decades of civil war without him, and the loya jerga functioned as the beginnings of a constitutional parliament in the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Throw the War Lords a feudal bargain to become fiefs to the monarchy or risk warfare against a NATO lead coalition. Then fly in Korean and Japanese Economic Development bureaucrats and one tenth the money we spent on Iraq. After nearly 10 years of economic development, Afghanistan would be the model democracy Bush wanted to establish in Iraq. The combination of functioning Muslim democracies in Turkey and Afghanistan would have put immense pressure for liberalization on Iran, and the combination of functioning democracies in India and Afghanistan would do the same for Pakistan. By 2012 you could have been looking at an archipellego of Democracies from Istanbul to Singapore, most of them Muslim (Myanmar being an exception). There are already modernizing efforts in several of the Emirates in the Persian Gulf.

To me that was the logical thing to do. At that point Bush would have been History's greatest leader. But he traded all that in for the goal of killing the legacy of FDR and invading Iraq. So now he's going down as one of history's worst leaders.

Since Bush failed in the surgical arena, an area size conflict looks all the more like a likely solution. I mean that in historical terms. I can't remember when things got this out of whack and a big war not starting up.

You can't have instable regimes in North Korea, a Pakistan and an Iran walking around with Nuclear weapons. If a big area size war is going to start up, and I perceive a 'two area' or one and a half area, then its time to get affairs in order. The World War II tax system has to be on the table. The financial and industrial systems have to be cleaned up forthwith. Alliances have to be ironed out and tightly stitched. The back door problem to dealing with these are areas is the Arab/Israel problem.

The extremist on both sides of the Israel/Palestine deal are in alliance in fighting against the moderates on both sides. The Jewish people in the Palestine/Israel condominium are already in a minority. There are more non-Jews than Jews in the West Bank, Israel proper and Gaza. The reason Sharon pulled out of Gaza was to reduce the demographic formula so that Jews weren't a ruling majority (al a South Africa).

The only way Zionist extremist can succeed is if there is utter pandemonium all over the Mideast. Then they can go about ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, which would mean pushing Arabs out. Quite likely the Palestinian side would like pandemonium as well to do the same thing, only in reverse. Perhaps both sides believe they would succeed in pandemonium scenario.

Long term, there is no way the United States can support anything but a sustainable two state solution - because anything else equates to ethnic cleansing and is inherently undemocratic.

If Bibi can't go for that, we need to back away from our close alliance with Israel. Since we can't support Israel in a single state solution, all we could then do is the next best thing: We can cut a bunch of visas for mass Jewish immigration out Israel for whomever didn't want to become partners in Bibi's project. There's no way we can absorb millions of them overnight, so we might have to set up temporary sites around the world. I'm sure that between the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand could absorb a mass migration of Isreali Jews out of Israel out of desire to not want to be part of Bibi's single state ethnic cleansing project. There's five million Israelis, I'm thinking perhaps two million would want out.

That's the choice. that's the divide. Bibi wants ethnic cleansing/single state solution. I'm sympathetic to that desire - Palestine is too small for one state, let alone two, but single state means ethnic cleansing of someone and that's not really palatable for Americans. The problem is, Bibi needs those two million Jews to remain in Israel and he needs American backing of Israel all the while for his project to succeed. These days he's counting on Obama worrying about re-election and losing the Jewish vote to keep him from criticizing Israel and him specifically. But I can see Obama saying: "we can't support, nor be a party to a single state solution, and so if Israeli policy is to pursue a single state solution, our policy has to be to support the Jewish people instead of Israeli policy." At which point, Netanyahoo would be out on his ear in a fort night.

Making a two state solution work is going to be messy. There's going to be some ugly head lines. But a single state solution, unless it's a pluralist solution (i.e. no state with a uniquely Jewish identity), is simply probably, and probably not possible. Over all, its quite unattractive development. There are no good solutions.