After weeks of saber rattling by administration hawks led to widespread speculation that the United States was prepared to launch an invasion even without U.N. sanction, President Bush’s speech before the world body last Wednesday decisively recast the Iraq debate, swelling the president’s support at home and getting erstwhile allies like Russia and France — who opposed American unilateralism — to start pressuring Iraq to readmit inspectors or else.

The speech was rightly hailed as a triumph for the president. But much less attention was given to the change of policy that brought that shift in debate or its implications.

For months, White House policy has been regime change, pure and simple. For all its Cheney-ite bluster, the president’s speech at the U.N. shifted the policy and debate to Iraqi compliance with a panoply of U.N. resolutions. That was a key victory for the policy favored by Colin Powell, and America’s allies reacted accordingly. But Saddam’s rapid decision to call the president’s bluff exposed the consequences of the president’s policy change — not pleasant ones for administration hard-liners.

No one believes Saddam has had a true change of heart about inspections and weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, he’ll take every chance he can get to evade or obstruct the truly invasive inspections that could denude him of his WMD arsenal. But until he does so — until he stiffs the inspectors and gives the U.S. the pretext to attack — the administration has little real choice but to go along with the process taking shape at the U.N., the one the president himself called for. Yesterday the president told reporters: “It’s [Saddam's] latest ploy, his latest attempt not to be held accountable for defying the United Nations.” No doubt it is a ploy, or at least a play for time. It would be different if the president had gone to the U.N. and said, “Time’s up. Saddam never complied with the Gulf War resolutions. Now we’re going to invade. Anyone who wants to join us is welcome to come along.” But he didn’t. He dared the U.N. to redeem itself by forcing Saddam to comply with its resolutions. Having said that, he has little choice but to let the U.N. try to force Saddam to make good on his pledge or see if he’ll try to wriggle out of it. And, as many hawks are now beginning to realize, that could take months or even years. If Democrats now seem less skittish about giving the president a vote, it’s likely because he now seems locked into a policy tied to the U.N. and one that might drag on for some time.

Some administration supporters insist that the president has simply gone too far out on the limb to walk back. “We’ve reached a point of no return,” says one D.C. Iraq-hawk in close touch with regime-change supporters in and out of the administration. “The rhetoric was just too high the last two weeks. It’s like ‘No New Taxes.’”

But the rapid turn of events has left most ardent supporters of regime change in the press floundering in a mix of disingenuousness and denial, unable to come to grips with the implications of the president’s policy or the changed state of the debate either at home or abroad. The turn of events has left some of the White House’s most fulsome advocates in the press busily eating words that they wrote only a week before. Last week Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes predicted the president would take the “gamble” of daring Saddam to readmit inspectors, a choice Barnes believed Saddam either could not or would not do. If he did he would “quickly lose control of his own government and fall from power,” Barnes wrote. Today Barnes seemed to have forgotten everything he’d written just days ago. Now he doesn’t think the president was taking a gamble at all. Saddam’s “disingenuous offer of a return to unconditional arms inspections” changed nothing, Barnes now writes, and only demonstrates that Saddam is “doomed.”

Barnes’ boss at the Weekly Standard, influential regime change advocate William Kristol, takes a longer, more nuanced view. “At the end of the day,” Kristol told Salon on Tuesday, “Saddam can’t live with an inspections regime that would deprive him of his weapons of mass destruction. Bush can’t live with Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. So I think we’re on course to regime change.” (Like many of the key hawks, Kristol believes that Saddam sees his WMD as literally the basis of his power, both in terms of his prestige inside and outside the country and his regional power aspirations. In the hawks’ view, asking Saddam to give up his WMD is basically tantamount to asking him to relinquish power.)

But the argument that Saddam’s obsession with keeping his WMD will precipitate war in the short term, rather than the long, runs up against certain key elements of the hawks’ own reasoning and, to some degree, simple logic. If Clinton was never serious about overthrowing Saddam and if Bush really is deadly serious about overthrowing Saddam’s government — and Saddam knows that — that gives him a level of incentive to comply he’s never had before. Certainly, Iraq will haggle over details. And if Bush lets up the pressure, Saddam will welsh on his new commitment. But as long as Bush doesn’t let up the pressure, Saddam seems likely to comply just enough to avoid giving the United States any pretext to attack. If that happens, much of the momentum for war built up over the summer could dissipate, as 9/11 recedes further. The inspections game could drag on for a year or more. And that thought makes regime-changers see red like nothing else.

To avoid that outcome, regime change supporters have rallied around a more audacious effort: rewriting the president’s speech after the fact. That is, maybe the president said that the issue was making Saddam live up to the resolutions, but in fact whether he does or not is really beside the point, because the real point is that Saddam can’t be trusted and must be ousted. Gary Schmitt, executive director of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, argues with remarkable frankness that the president’s speech only conditionally accepted the legitimacy of the U.N. “In some ways,” says Schmitt, “you’re saying it’s a legitimate body for making legitimate decisions. On the other hand you’re saying it’s legitimate to the extent that it accomplishes the goals that the institution was supposed to address.” In other words, Saddam is an outlaw who has forfeited the protection of the U.N., and whether or not he superficially complies with its rules now is irrelevant: It must sign off on his removal, or itself become irrelevant.

Schmitt, for his part, isn’t even sure the administration will even let inspectors get into Iraq before trying to force a change in the terms of the argument. “At some point,” says Schmitt, “they’ve got to come out and make the argument that the kind of inspections that Saddam may be agreeing to are just not satisfactory. I don’t think they can sustain their position unless they start making the argument that UNSCOM-lite isn’t going to get the job done and in fact it’s going to make matters worse. It requires making further arguments and beating the drums along those lines.” The letter of the president’s speech was resolutions, the regime-changers now say, but its spirit was regime change. And the spirit of the speech is what counts.

But this reasoning seems to partake heavily of wishful thinking. It assumes the president, after making the U.N.’s resolutions the issue, can suddenly pull an about-face and simply invade Iraq. But that seems highly implausible. He would immediately squander all the internationalist goodwill at home and abroad that he gained from his U.N. speech: indeed, such an action would arguably take relations between the U.S. and the international community to their nadir. If the president truly felt able to call his own shots and define the terms of the coming world debate entirely to his liking he wouldn’t have needed to go to the U.N. at all. Clearly he felt the need to enlist the support, or at least acquiescence, from countries like France and Russia and the Arab states that he seemed to have in hand late last week. Having put his cards on the table last week, can he really pick them up and deal himself a new hand?

The president still has plenty of room to up the ante on Saddam. After UNSCOM inspectors were booted out of Iraq in 1998, the U.N. replaced UNSCOM with a new agency, UNMOVIC. The inspections called for by UNMOVIC are much looser than the old ones. And the president should and no doubt will insist that any new inspections be at least as tough as the old ones. The administration can also insist on a new resolution authorizing force if and when Saddam reneges on his pledge. But it will still be up to Iraq and other Security Council members to decide if and when to say no, if and when to give the president his pretext to let the bombs drop. If the president really isn’t serious about trying to enforce the resolutions, then his ultimatum to Saddam and his challenge to the U.N. doesn’t really work. It may make sense to other Iraq-hawks in Washington. It may even be the right policy. But it won’t fly with the other allies who took the president at his word when he seemed to signal a willingness to work through the U.N.

Rather desperately, some Iraq hawks are arguing that inspectors are only one of the conditions the president laid down. At the U.N. the president demanded Iraqi compliance with a raft of U.N. resolutions requiring, among other things, an accounting of Gulf War POWs, monetary reparations to Kuwait, and an end to political repression inside Iraq. That laundry list of demands was so long, and it was so unlikely that Iraq would comply with it, that the White House would always be left with some example of unfulfilled U.N. requirements to justify war. But within days of the speech it was clear that this reasoning was too clever by half. None of the countries at the U.N. are going to be goaded into backing war against Iraq because it hadn’t accounted for some Qatari POWs who probably died a dozen years ago.

Some Iraq hawks are now privately grousing that the difficulties the administration finds itself in prove that Bush should never have gone to the U.N. Others maintain that in the real world, as opposed to the hermetic universe of right-wing think tanks, the administration really had no choice. It’s a debate that mimics the internal ones that have been roiling the administration all summer.

One prominent conservative says that the Iraq hawks overlooked a key element in gathering support for any war: a dramatic precipitating event. Danielle Pletka was a much loved and much hated street-fighter in the D.C. Iraq wars of the late 1990s. She’s an ardent regime-changer who served until recently as Jesse Helms’ chief advisor on Middle East policy. “This is a little bit outside the orthodoxy of the grand ‘regime change’ crowd,” says Pletka, who is now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “but one of the main things lacking in the regime change program was always the ‘why.’” By the “why,” Pletka doesn’t mean that the hawks haven’t made the case that Saddam’s a bad guy or, in her opinion, that the U.S. is justified in overthrowing his government. She means that the Iraq hawks never quite hashed out the immediate rationale for invading.

“To go into Iraq like that without providing some sort of trigger would have proven more difficult than many have envisioned,” she told Salon on Tuesday. “When it comes down to actually going in and invading a country and deposing a leader — for whatever good reason — when push comes to shove, figuring out how you get your foot in the front door is not as easy as people think. This isn’t a Nike commercial. We can’t ‘just do it.’ For people on the outside, it’s always easy to say this is the policy. It’s gotta happen. Let’s go. No problem. But I think the international reality is much more complicated than that.”

“The question,” says Pletka, “is whether the administration is deft enough to deal with the obstacles which Iraq with the help of its friends on the Security Council is going to throw in our way.”

Pletka believes the administration is up to that task, but that it will take time. But others see an administration boxed in, with no clear path to the goal its most ardent hawks cherish.

How did a 40-chapter U.N. work plan on sustainable development, published in 1992, foster such a fervent backlash among conservative groups? Agenda 21, first revealed at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, aimed to address environmental and development concerns through global partnership initiatives. While the plan covered everything from the sharing of educational resources to strategies for economic and environmental development, conservative groups have focused primarily on its fourth section — titled “the means for implementation” — as revealing Agenda 21’s true and, for them, insidious nature.

While a recent New York Times article described anti-Agenda 21 activism as emerging roughly two years ago, the roots of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory go back at least a decade. As early as 2002 Dr. Stanley Monteith, a Santa Cruz County, Calif., physician, who runs the conservative Christian website Radio Liberty, hosted a series of lectures on the dangers of Agenda 21. An insurance salesperson named  Joan Peros gave a nearly hour-long lecture on the perils of Agenda 21, warning, it “doesn’t matter which party is in power or control … some of our leaders totally understand and embrace the ushering in of a one-world order.”

The paranoia behind such fears was expressed by another guest lecturer on Monteith’s program, Jean Soderman, a self-professed former participant in Local Agenda 21 planning in Santa Cruz. When asked whether Agenda 21 would be worse than what Hitler did, she responded, “Yes. We are controlled by computers now and it has been said … that they have been trying this for two times already … first with Hitler, and it is going to be much, much worse.”

Michael Shaw, also from Santa Cruz and founder of the anti-Agenda 21 website Freedom Advocates, gave a lecture in 2006 at the Eagle Forum Conference in Santa Rosa, titled “Speaking of Agenda 21.” Shaw spoke about the loss of property rights through the ruse of “sustainable development,” and described Agenda 21 as “political globalists … moving toward a form of … state capitalism.  It is an assault on land and that is where we have to stand up and protect our land.”

The anti-Agenda 21 critique entered the conservative mainstream in an October 2009 article in the American Thinker. Scott Strzelcky and Richard Rothschild charged that, through the implementation of “smart growth” initiatives,  Agenda 21 would  force people to relocate into highly urbanized areas — what anti-Agenda 21 activists commonly describe as “stack ‘em and pack ‘em” housing, evoking the image of Soviet-era East Berlin apartments. According to Strzelcky and Rothschild, Agenda 21 will ultimately lead to the demise of the suburban way of life.

Such concerns over the loss of private property rights are not a new phenomenon in the United States. The Wise Use movement in the West of the late 1980s brought together farmers, loggers, industries, religious groups, libertarians and conservatives to oppose the Endangered Species Act and other federal environment laws. According to investigative journalist Jeffery St. Clair, the Wise Use members saw themselves as players in “a high-stakes-chess game” against the environmental movement, whose members were “overtly carrying out a sinister master plan, a vast socialist experiment to depopulate the rural West.” When asked about the evolution of property rights movements, Jeffery St. Clair told me, “in the West, many of the Tea Party activists are the same old Wise Users in new hairstyles.”

But while the Wise Use movement centered around protecting rural and federal lands from perceived government encroachment, anti-Agenda 21 activists are concerned that private property, for them an extension of one’s liberties and freedoms, will cease to exist entirely.

The movement really took off in July 2011 after Glenn Beck devoted a show to those “who had mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then dismissing it as a joke.” Beck held up  a copy of United Nations Earth Summit Agenda 21. “Sustainable development is just a really nice way of saying centralized control over all of human life on Planet Earth,” he stated. “Whenever you start unraveling this, it is like an onion … its real intentions are being masked with environmental issues.”

With his patented chalkboard, Beck drew the web of connections that has been fueling Agenda 21 panic ever since: the activities of a group called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, known as  ICLEI — or Local Agenda 21. Started in San Francisco in 1990, ICLEI’s primary goal is to provide consultation, training and information to support sustainable development at the local level.  For Anti-Agenda 21 activists, ICLEI is the real enemy.

As Andrew Cohen wrote in a recent article for the Atlantic:

You would think that the Tea Party, with its disdain for large government, would be delighted with the ICLEI’s emphasis on “locally designed initiatives.” No. To the “Agender” crowd, as they are called, the ICLEI is the local instrument by which the UN forces its “sustainability” agenda upon the U.S.

It’s only within the last few months that the New York Times and the Atlantic have reported on this backlash by anti-Agenda 21 activists against local planning projects. Recently in Florida, a Tea Party group in Citrus County argued against the restriction of boating rights in Kings Bay (designed to protect the Kings Bay manatees). Edna Mattos, the leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, cited Agenda 21 as being behind this proposed restriction.

At the same time, Agenda 21 has become a talking point for presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. Speaking in South Carolina on the perils of Agenda 21,  Gingrich decried what he called “taking control of your private property and turning it into a publicly controlled property.” Gingrich has also proposed an executive order “to cease all federal funding of any kind of activity that relates to United Nations Agenda 21.” In addition, bills publicly condemning Agenda 21 have been introduced by Republican state representatives in Tennessee, New Hampshire and Georgia.

Anti-Agenda 21 rhetoric not only plays into fears over the declining suburban lifestyle, but has changed the vocabulary of city planners. Many of the planners that I have spoken with are taking to heart Andrew Whittemon’s recommendations to take the concerns of Agenda 21 more seriously and to speak more clearly.

Whittemon, a professor of planning at the University of Texas, Arlington, said, “Planners can avoid conflict by being explicit about the most direct harms coming to residents and businesses, giving attention to local solutions, and certainly dropping the jargon.”

The impact of the movement is already felt. One city planner I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: “The Agenda 21 accusations that we hear in public meetings are the most counterproductive to reaching consensus or middle ground in land use planning. So we are staying away from using words like ‘sustainable development.’”

“We will not allow any political manoeuvring on this issue,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Abbas and former chief of negotiations.

Erekat said Abbas had made that plain in discussions with all parties involved over the last three days of meetings in the lead-up to the annual UN global gathering of presidents, heads of state and ruling royalty.

Sarkozy proposed a one-year timetable Wednesday for Israel and the Palestinians to reach a peace accord, part of a concerted push with the United States to steer the Palestinians away from an application for U.N. membership.

Sarkozy spoke shortly after Obama warned against action on the Palestinian bid before there was a peace agreement. He said negotiations, not U.N. declarations, were essential to a lasting peace.

While Obama stopped short of calling directly for the Palestinians to drop their bid for full membership — an effort the U.S. has vowed to veto in the Security Council — Sarkozy sounded a more compromising tone and urged each side, and the international community, to approach the deadlocked process with new ideas and tactics.

“Let us cease our endless debates on the parameters and let us begin negotiations and adopt a precise and ambitious timetable,” Sarkozy told the leaders and officials gathered at the U.N. “Sixty years without moving one centimeter forward, doesn’t that suggest that we should change the method and the scheduling here?”

“Let’s have one month to resume discussions, six months to find agreement on borders and security, one year to reach a definitive agreement,” he said.

A senior European Union official said the proposal laid out by Sarkozy matched one by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton during a meeting with EU foreign ministers on Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

Abbas’ push for full membership, which he has said would be submitted on Friday, has dominated this year’s U.N. meeting, pushing the U.S. and Israel against a wall of international sympathy for Palestinians. While the full membership bid would meet with a certain U.S. veto in the Security Council, assuming the Palestinians muster enough votes to have it approved, they have succeeded in bringing the issue again to the forefront of the world’s political discussions after years of failed negotiations, bickering and sporadic outbreaks of violence.

Sarkozy said that by setting preconditions, “we doom ourselves to failure. … There must be no preconditions.”

It remained unclear whether the latest proposal would be enough to avert a showdown over statehood that has consumed the U.N. over the past few days and sparked a frenzy of last-minute diplomatic door-knocking by the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as a flurry of discussions between the Quartet of Mideast negotiators — the U.S., the E.U., the U.N. and Russia.

But the proposal outlined by Sarkozy received a warmer welcome from the Palestinians than Obama’s comments.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Abbas aide, told The Associated Press that the Palestinians “appreciate the speech and the positions included in that speech.”

“The Palestinian leadership will study seriously the positions and the ideas in that speech,” he said.

Obama’s remarks, however, drew a lukewarm response, with the Palestinian delegation wearing stern and disapproving looks as the U.S. president spoke.

“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations — if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now,” the president told U.N. delegates. “Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians — not us — who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them.”

Obama showed solidarity with Israel, not mentioning a return to the borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in which Israel annexed territory. The remarks may rile some in the Arab world where mass uprisings against authoritarian regimes have also sparked a new measure of anti-U.S. sentiment. Obama’s words also stood in stark contrast to the image he left behind when he addressed the Muslim world from Cairo in 2009, pledging to improve relations and cooperation.

Senior Palestinian officials said Abbas will reiterate to Obama his decision to move forward with the application for membership that will be submitted to the Security Council. But they also said that the Palestinians seek to cooperate with the U.S. and will be ready to return to the negotiating table once a solid foundation for talks was in place.

Nabil Abu Redeineh said that “peace in the Middle East needs an immediate end of the Israeli occupation” and that the U.S. needs to pressure Israel to immediately withdraw from lands annexed in 1967. The Palestinians are ready to return to talks “the minute Israel accepts” those borders and stops settlement building, he said.

Obama was scheduled to meet later Wednesday with Abbas.

He met earlier in the day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With Obama at his side, the Israeli premier said the Palestinian bid to appeal directly to the U.N. was a short cut that “will not succeed.” Netanyahu also lauded Obama for speaking up on principle.

The issue of Palestinian statehood has gained new momentum in the Arab world amid the so-called Arab Spring uprisings that have ousted the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and laid the still rocky foundations for a new era of freedom and democratic nations in a region dominated by dictators, monarchs and other entrenched regimes.

Associated Press writers Mohammed Daraghmeh, Amy Teibel and Julie Pace in New York contributed reporting.

He has spent his entire career trying to avoid Palestinian statehood with delaying tactics and maneuvers — seemingly willing to negotiate everything anywhere, but in reality putting up every obstacle he can in the path of peace and permanent settlement with the Palestinians.

Not that the Palestinians are guiltless in this stand off. They have had offers and opportunities they have not taken. But the entire Middle East is now in a state of flux and transition, and, as a practical matter, to try to keep the Palestinians frozen in their status as an occupied people without political rights is to ask for serious trouble — both for Israel and the U.S. The next Intifada will be far more destructive than the last two.

As a moral matter it is simply time to let the Palestinians have their state just as Harry Truman recognized that the Jews, after all they had been through in Europe in World War II, should have their state in 1948.

Many Israelis understand this. Former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told The New York Times that “the world is tired of this conflict and angry at us because we are viewed as conquerors, ruling over another people. If I were Bibi Netanyahu I would recognize a Palestinian State. We would then negotiate borders and security.” But Netanyahu comes from the so-called “Revisionist” wing of Zionism that is reluctant to give up any part of what they consider the biblical land of Israel.

When David Ben Gurion on May 14th, 1948, declared that the state of Israel would come into being at midnight, America responded with de-facto recognition almost immediately. But the Soviet Union came through first with de-jure recognition, something the U.S. did not grant until an elected government had been formed in January of 1949.

Even with the two superpowers onboard, the U.N. Security Council did not grant Israel U.N. membership until May 11, 1949 — a full year after the state was declared — and after a long fight to physically secure its borders.

Palestine might come into being in reverse order — declare sovereignty now, gain admittance to the U.N., and then negotiate the borders with Israel, as Ben-Eliezer suggested.

There are many who say there are dangers involved in a Palestinian state, and they are right, just as those in Truman’s State Department, including George C. Marshall, were right in warning that the creation of a Jewish state would cause a sea of troubles.

And there are those who say that the Palestinian problem is exaggerated, that it doesn’t really matter if they remain an occupied people, because giving them their freedom would not solve all the issues of the Middle East or placate Islamic extremists. And they, too, are right. Giving the Palestinians their state would not solve all the issues of the Middle East, but it would surely help. Again and again, year in and year out, the centrality of the Palestinian problem never goes away. Even General David Petraeus, from his command post in Afghanistan, recognized that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians was hurting America’s war efforts as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Richard Perle and David Frum, in their book, “An End to Evil, How to Win the War on Terror,” submit that “in the Arab and Muslim World, the Palestinian issue has never been about compassion, mercy, or even justice. First and always, this issue has been about vengeance…”, i.e., “the destruction of Israel and the re-conquest of the Holy Land.” This might be true of some, but this is akin to saying the Jews in Israel want to take over Jordan just because that was an original “revisionist” goal back in 1947, or because David Ben Gurion once put feelers out to the British and French in 1956 that Jordan should be divided up between Israel and Iraq. Yes, some Arabs still might want to destroy Israel, just as some Israelis want to expel all the Palestinians, but that does not represent the vast majority nor government policy in either Israel or the Arab world.

The Obama administration tried its best to talk the Palestinians out of going to the United Nations to legitimize their state but failed. Given the administration’s record, this failure was entirely predictable. Obama came into office seeming to promise a renewed energy toward trying to solve the Palestinian problem, following President Bush’s near-total support for whatever Israel wanted.

Obama went eyeball to eyeball with Netanyahu over settlements, and the Palestinians saw that Obama blinked first. It was obvious then that Obama might talk a good game, but that the Israeli tail was always going to wag the American dog. The sight of Netanyahu who, having defied and insulted the American president, addressing a joint session of Congress with congressmen and senators of both parties jumping to their feet like jack-in-the-boxes to show their support, was all anyone needed to understand Israel’s power in the American Congress.

The Democratic Party has to be mindful of pro-Zionist political support. But it is in America’s strategic interest, and ultimately in Israel’s interest too, to lance the boil of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

If it was the right thing to do to recognize the state of Israel when it was first born, it is time now to grant the same rights and privileges to the Palestinian people. The Obama administration is always talking about being on the right side of history in the Middle East. The United States could abstain, if it must, but vetoing Palestinian nationalist aspirations would put us on the wrong side of history.

Hours later, Hadzic was brought in for questioning at the war crimes court in the capital Belgrade, a key step toward his extradition to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. His lawyer said Hadzic will not appeal the process, paving the way for a quick extradition, possibly within the next few days.

State TV footage showed Hadzic entering the courtroom escorted by guards. He walked slowly, slightly hunched, wearing a gray shirt, short hair and a mustache. His black beard had been shaved.

An unknown figure before the 1991-1995 ethnic war for control of Croatia, Hadzic suddenly rose to prominence through his links to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s secret police. Put in charge of the self-styled Serb ministate in eastern Croatia, he was seen as a pawn of criminal gangs that collaborated heavily with the secret police and made huge profits from smuggled cars, gasoline and cigarettes.

The Hague tribunal indicted him in 2004 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity including the murder, torture, deportation and forcible transfer of Croats and other non-Serbs from the territories he controlled.

Less than two months after the capture of Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, Serbia’s Western-leaning president announced live on national television that “Serbia has concluded its most difficult chapter in the cooperation with the Hague Tribunal.”

“It was our moral duty,” President Boris Tadic said. “We have done this for the sake of citizens of Serbia, we have done this for the sake of the victims amongst other nations, we have done this for the sake of reconciliation, we have done this for the sake of establishing credibility of all societies, not only Serbian society.”

In his indictment Hadzic is accused of responsibility for the 1991 leveling of Vukovar, said to be the first European city entirely destroyed since World War II.

In one of the worst massacres in the Croatian conflict, Serb forces seized at least 264 non-Serbs from Vukovar Hospital after a three-month siege of the city, took them to a nearby pig farm, tortured, shot and buried them in an unmarked mass grave.

A month before about 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) southwest of Vukovar, about 50 Croats who had been detained for forced labor were made to walk through a minefield to render it safe for the Serbs, according to the indictment.

“Upon reaching the minefield, the detainees were forced to enter the minefield and sweep their feet in front of them to clear the field of mines,” it said.

Hadzic worked with paramilitary forces that became notorious for their brutality, including the “Tigers,” led by Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan. In that same month of October 1991, Arkan’s men captured 28 civilians from a police facility in Dalj, tortured them and threw their bodies in the Danube. Arkan was assassinated in a Belgrade hotel in 2000.

Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, said the arrests of Mladic and Hadzic “mark a long-awaited step forward in Serbia’s cooperation.”

EU leaders immediately welcomed the arrest and saluted “the determination and commitment” of Tadic’s government.

“This is a further important step for Serbia in realizing its European perspective and equally crucial for international justice,” said a joint statement by EU president Herman Van Rompuy, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barrios and foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

A tribunal statement said Hadzic will be transferred to The Hague as soon as judicial procedures are completed in Serbia. That normally takes several days.

He will then be brought before a judge to hear a reading of the 14 charges against him. He may enter a plea or delay for a month.

Tribunal president O-Gon Kwon said the arrest was a milestone in the history of the court, which has indicted 161 leaders from the former Yugoslavia since it was created in 1993 at the height of the fighting.

The tribunal has been under U.N. pressure to wind up its cases and close its doors.

Serbian security police found out that Hadzic was meeting a money courier and arrested him Wednesday morning outside the village of Krusedol, Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told reports.

Until this week, Tadic said, Serbian officials did not know where Goran Hadzic was, despite suspicions that he had been sheltered by former allies.

In the past, Hadzic had narrowly escaped arrest, apparently due to tips from within the Serbian security authorities. Serbia’s post-war authorities have for years faced accusations that they are not doing enough to hunt down the war crimes suspects.

Serbia, widely viewed as the main culprit for the wars in the Balkans, has been working to reintegrate into the international community following years of sanctions and pariah status in the 1990s.

Milosevic was extradited to the Hague tribunal in 2001 and died there in 2006, while on trial for genocide.

Along with Mladic, Serbia has also arrested war crimes fugitives Radovan Karadzic. Both are currently facing war crimes charges in the Hague.

Dusan Stojanovic and Slobodan Lekic contributed.