Unfortunately, the Bush administration, undeterred by the bloody chaos in Iraq, still seems intent on spreading its ill-fitting idea of democracy in the region, with Syria its possible next target. A well-informed analyst in Damascus told me that the United States is preparing an “Iraq scenario” for the country, including possibly imposing a no-fly zone in the Kurdish-dominated north. The United States’ rumored plans are likely to backfire, slowing down reform or halting it altogether. Worse, they could plunge Syria and Lebanon into violent chaos.

The Syrian Baath Party, whose right to rule is inscribed in the constitution, gathered this week in Damascus to discuss reforms. But instead of the “great leap forward” that had been promised by the country’s president, Bashar Assad, the congress merely shuffled along, as could be expected from a party that has been in power for more than 40 years. The Baath will for the foreseeable future remain a tool for the continued rule of the Assad family and its allies, even if a few more superficial freedoms are allowed. The big internal question, say some in Damascus, is whether the lack of progress will cause the current low-level grumbling in the country to explode into open rebellion. Others point out that there is no alternative to the regime. There is no effective and organized opposition, except perhaps the banned and persecuted Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood (whose members were slaughtered by the thousands by Assad’s father, Hafez, in 1982), and nobody wants Syria to descend to the level of chaos now seen in Iraq.

As the congress wound down, statements by the Bush administration and the United Nations made it clear that the United States and the international community will continue to put pressure on Syria. But Syrian government minister Buthaina Shaaban dismissed suggestions that the Baath Party’s deliberations had been influenced by external considerations. “All that has been discussed and decided has been discussed because of our national needs,” she said.

As for Lebanon, optimism about a Cedar Revolution has so far proved to be greatly overblown. Following the withdrawal of Syrian troops after a 29-year presence, it is still in the midst of its complicated, and arguably undemocratic, election cycle, one that is unaccountably spread out over four regional rounds. “If Ethiopia can have elections in one go, why not Lebanon?” one EU election monitor wondered. In the first two rounds, in Beirut and the south, the outcome was largely predetermined by deals between powerful political bosses, to the disgust of many voters who were left with very little to vote on. The next two rounds may be more competitive, mainly because personal rivalries have split the opposition. Nobody has a program that people can vote on, and parties barely exist. Many of the young Lebanese who turned out for the massive anti-Syrian demonstrations after the murder of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri said they were disgusted by the first two rounds and that this was not the change they had pushed for.

Two keen observers of the situation, one in Beirut and the other in Damascus, recently offered similar explanations for what’s going on. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese political analyst and author, and Joshua Landis, an American expert on Syria who lives in Damascus, where he publishes the respected blog SyriaComment.com, both remarked that the rule of the “Zaïm,” the old-style political boss, is still very much alive in both countries, despite the one-party state in Syria and the chaotic Lebanese appearance of democracy. The bosses dispense money, contracts, jobs, educational opportunities, sometimes even permission to marry. They skim off the wealth of the state, award themselves the most lucrative concessions, and block competition. Their power base is often a large family or tribe, a village or region, a religious allegiance, the army, or all of these combined. They may found parties, such as the Progressive Socialist Party, controlled by the Druze Jumblatt family, or the Christian Phalange Party founded by the Gemayels in Lebanon, that serve as fronts and tools. This “rule of the bosses” also holds true in other parts of the region, including Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories.

In Syria, Landis said, the Zaïm system has simply been extended to include the Baath Party. The Baath, in the eyes of many in Syria, nowadays merely serves to legitimize this rule of the “mafias,” as they call it. Endemic and deeply entrenched corruption is one of the hallmarks of the Zaïm system, and Syria has it by the bucketload.

“There is a marriage between power and money in Syria,” said Marwan Kabalan of the Center for Strategic Studies at Damascus University. Kabalan noted that this is one of the main reasons that the country has not been able to reform itself, even if it seriously wanted to. “You have to keep the pillars of the leadership happy,” Kabalan said. “Especially if you rule, as the government does here, without the consent of the people.” According to Landis, Syria is still deeply divided along regional and sectarian lines. Although the government, dominated by the minority Allawite sect, tries hard to downplay this, the divided nature of the country is what allows the Zaïm system to continue. The only groups that pose a real challenge to the authorities are the Kurds in the northeast and the persecuted (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, which has members across the country. The nonsectarian liberal opposition is given much more freedom to speak out, probably because its ideas barely resonate among the population.

In Lebanon, the anti-Israeli, Shiite Islamist Hezbollah movement has been the one of the few parties widely considered to remain free of the taint of the system. It is not known to be corrupt, as many of the other political groupings are said to be, and until recently it did not engage in the political horse-trading that is the Lebanese system of government. This time around that image has been tainted, said Saad-Ghorayeb, who is an expert on Hebzollah. “The party has finally been forced to play by the rules of the Zaïm system,” Saad-Ghorayeb said. She is referring to the many political deals Hezbollah was forced to make in an attempt to stave off pressure to disarm following the withdrawal of its Syrian protectors.

Hezbollah is the only Lebanese group that retained its arms after the end of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1990 and the Israeli army’s withdrawal from the south in 2000. It has been able to do this by marketing itself as the “resistance” to Israel, which gives it the legitimacy to retain its arms and run a state-within-a-state in the south.

But Saad-Ghorayeb said that the party has now become just one of Lebanon’s many regional and sectarian political players, which base their strength on a captive bloc vote and use it to skim off income from the state and businesses. In Hezbollah’s case, the corruption is not thought to be direct. Rather, it has been tainted by its newfound alliance with the more moderate Shiite Amal movement, which many regard as deeply corrupt.

Syria and Lebanon have been very much in the eye of the international community, particularly since Hariri was killed by a huge car bomb in the center of Beirut on Valentine’s Day. The common assumption both in Lebanon and abroad was that Syria was responsible, a charge that Damascus denies. Even before the assassination, the Syrians had been under increasing pressure to withdraw from the country that it regards as its backyard, if not part of “Greater Syria.” In August last year, they forced the Lebanese Parliament to amend the constitution to allow for the extension of the mandate of the unpopular but pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud. This move was a serious diplomatic blunder by Damascus: It turned the French against Syria, paving the way for the passage of the American- and French-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution 1559, which demanded the departure of all foreign troops from the country and the disarming of militias, that is, Hezbollah.

The end to this saga is not yet in sight, despite Syrian hopes that the withdrawal would placate the international community. First of all, the United Nations is not yet satisfied that resolution 1559 has been fully implemented. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urgently dispatched his Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, back to the region, and announced that he is going to send a verification team to check reports that Syrian intelligence agents are still active in Lebanon. The U.N. moves followed the assassination of prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir in Beirut, which reopened the wounds of the Hariri killing. Many automatically pointed the finger at Damascus. Syria has denied involvement, but Lebanese commentators say that even if Syria was not behind it, the Syrian government and its Lebanese allies have created an atmosphere in which such acts could take place. There are also allegations that many pro-Syrian agents are still at work in Lebanon and are being encouraged by Damascus.

The United States has asked for the Kassir killing to be investigated by the same U.N. team that is already in Beirut to look into the Hariri assassination. Reports in U.S. newspapers on Friday quote an unnamed senior administration official as saying that Syrian intelligence officers still in Lebanon have drawn up a “hit list” of anti-Syrian figures. Of course this may be propaganda, part of the Bush administration’s strategy of waging a media war of attrition against Damascus. An example of this propaganda campaign came last month, when another unnamed official said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Iraqi al-Qaida network, had visited Syria to consult with other militants on the recent insurgent offensive in Iraq. Later the administration said it actually had no information on such a visit.

The Hariri investigation is hanging over the Syrian government’s head like a sword of Damocles, said one Western diplomat in Damascus. The European Union, for example, is unlikely to take action on signing the important trade, social and cultural Association Agreement with Syria until the results of the Hariri investigation are known, several diplomats said. The agreement is important because it would allow the government to show that it is not isolated internationally. The United States has reportedly asked the EU not to go ahead with the deal for now, but a European diplomat in Damascus said that the EU has its own reasons not to sign the deal.

Another direct challenge to the implementation of resolution 1559 is Hezbollah’s defiant stance. The “party of God” was bolstered by a solid election victory in its southern fiefdom last Sunday. Hezbollah itself, as well as Lebanese newspapers and analysts, explained the result as an emphatic rejection by voters in the south of the demand to disarm. “They gave a clear message to the foreigners, particularly to the Americans, that the people of Lebanon are unified over the resistance and the independence,” said Hezbollah’s second in command, Naim Qassem. Even though most political groups in Lebanon publicly deny that they will push for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the movement and its allies fear that this is about to happen following the recent departure of its Syrian allies from the country. “The Americans and the French and others will push the expanded anti-Syrian bloc in the next Parliament to disarm Hezbollah. And that will lead to disaster,” said pro-Syrian member of Parliament Adnan Arakji.

The White House has already made clear that it regards the victory of Hezbollah, which it regards as a terrorist group, with unease. “These elections are ongoing and in terms of Hezbollah, I think our views are well known and they remain unchanged,” said press secretary Scott McClellan. “You have a Security Council resolution that calls for the disarming of groups like Hezbollah, and that remains our view. Hezbollah, as you are well aware, is a terrorist organization.” The State Department, too, said it viewed Hezbollah’s continued strength with concern. “There should be no role for an armed militia” in a democratic government, said one official. (Not surprisingly, the U.S. official said nothing about the recent statement by Iraqi president Talabani defending the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite Badr Brigade militias.) So there seems very little chance that the United States will let up on the pressure to implement resolution 1559. Lebanese and Syrian supporters of Hezbollah hope that the Europeans, who have not put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations, will be less focused on disarming the group. But Western diplomats in Damascus say there is very little that divides the U.S. and the EU at the moment on 1559 and that there is little prospect that international pressure on Syria will ease.

In fact, one analyst in Damascus said he had indications that the Bush administration, which has long wanted to topple the Syrian regime, is readying an “Iraq scenario” for the country. The United States is hoping to use the Kurds as it has done in northern Iraq. Tensions in the northeastern region of Syria have reportedly reached the boiling point after Kurds blamed the killing of Mohammed Mashouq al-Khaznawi, one of their important sheiks, on the Syrian authorities. The government emphatically denies the charge and has arrested “criminals” who it says are responsible. But clashes have already taken place in the main town, Qamishli, and people who have visited the area expect worse to come. The Kurds are certainly furious, judging by statements issued by their banned political parties. Earlier this week in Damascus, one Kurdish taxi driver even dared shout, “Come in Bush, please come in,” with his windows closed.

If the situation in the Kurdish region gets out of hand, said the analyst in Damascus, the United States may impose a no-fly zone over the region, just as it did after the 1990 Gulf War in northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. is also trying to unite the fractured opposition by encouraging the Kurds, the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberals to work together. This is supposed to address the perceived lack of an alternative to the Baath government.

If this is true, it raises the obvious question of how the Bush administration could seriously contemplate another Iraq-type adventure when Iraq is in worsening chaos, with U.S. troops and Iraqis dying daily and no end in sight. Bush strategists may dream that regime change in Syria would magically solve all the region’s problems at once. In fact, it might make them worse.

Toppling the Assad regime will not solve the problem of Iraq, because even if Syria is substantially involved in the fighting there, which is doubtful, the basic fuel for the insurgency remains the internal Iraqi situation. The majority of insurgents are Sunnis, mostly former Baathists, with access to the huge stockpiles of weapons that the Americans failed to safeguard after the invasion. It may be true that most of the suicide bombers are foreign, and that a new regime would be able to secure the long Syria-Iraq border across which many foreign jihadis slip into Iraq. But it is highly unlikely that a stable new regime would emerge in Syria — or that if it did, it would be friendly to the United States. The political and social structures in Syria and Iraq are quite similar: What did not work in Iraq will almost certainly not work in Syria, either.

Nor would toppling the Syrian regime make the Palestinians cry uncle. A major reason that Bush administration neocons have long pushed for regime change in Syria, Iraq and Iran is their enmity to Israel. It’s true that the backing of the “rejectionist states” gave the Palestinians some strategic depth — support for the families of suicide bombers, for Hamas, for arms shipments. But the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is within Palestine: What happens at a regional level is secondary. In any case, any new regime in Syria (or any other Arab state, for that matter) would almost certainly have a hostile stance toward Israel until the Palestinian issue is resolved. In the case of Syria, there is the added issue of the Golan Heights: No Syrian government will normalize relations with Israel until it returns the Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.

As for Lebanon, it was chaotic and venal long before the Syrians started meddling. A U.S-backed regime in Syria might upset the delicate power balance in Lebanon and make things even worse. (It could also have a spillover into Iraq: The Shiites in Iraq would not take happily to a U.S. campaign to marginalize the Hezbollah-supporting Shiite majority in Lebanon.)

Above all, a U.S.-backed campaign to remove the Syrian regime would be folly because especially post-Iraq, any stamp of American approval means a death knell for opposition parties in the Middle East. The United States thus faces a paradoxical situation: In order to encourage reform, it cannot appear to back it.

An analyst who is not given to idle talk and has contacts at the highest levels of the U.S. administration agreed that the idea of U.S.-backed regime change was a bad one. “Yes, the Americans are stupid,” the analyst said. “Unfortunately the Syrians are even more stupid.”

Under these circumstances, the tepid call for a “constructive dialogue with the U.S. and the EU” by delegates at the Baath Party’s 10th congress, which ended earlier this week in Damascus, looks laughably out of touch. One reformist-minded Baathist, Ayman Abdel Nour, said after the congress finished that more reforms were soon to follow, because the leadership realized that “we don’t have time to go slow-motion because of the international and regional situation.” But many observers and analysts in the Syrian capital say that the leadership is merely trying to toss the international community a few bones now and then to see if it can be placated. If one doesn’t work, it will try tossing another. Many in Damascus fear the United States will run out of patience before the leadership runs out of bones.

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.