When I landed in Togo in mid-2000, I shared a ride with a young Congolese woman who had just arrived to work on a poverty alleviation initiative at the United Nations Development Program. When I left Togo two and a half years later, the program had still not managed to spend any of its allocated $2 million on poverty alleviation projects, but the young lady had managed to embark on an affair with a son of the country’s brutal dictator. The UNDP office in Togo was divided between lackadaisical, corrupt staff and dedicated, energetic ones; the country representative, a brilliant and sincere woman, directed promising programs toward the more proactive staff, while carefully placating the sluggards. The office was, in other words, like much of the U.N.: Making it work demanded someone of enormous diplomatic talent and patience. Someone like Kofi Annan.
James Traub’s inside account of several years in the life of the retiring U.N. secretary-general is a chronicle of diplomatic talent and patience, and it makes for a fascinating, if sometimes exasperating, read. In Traub’s telling, Annan, a sympathetic but meek hero, is repeatedly abused by powerful agents posing as benefactors or suitors, escaping only to be again beset by disaster. It’s a picaresque adventure in the mold of “Candide” or “Great Expectations,” as the title, “Best Intentions,” suggests; though “A Series of Unfortunate Events” might have been equally apt. The book works, not just as a portrait of Annan but as one of the U.N. itself, in part because Annan personally encapsulates many characteristics of that inspiring but maddening organization.
Annan is a quiet man, tolerant to a fault, committed to the highest ideals of humanitarianism, but resigned to the constrictions of his office. He is a wily politician, but his caution sometimes shades into paralysis. Where Annan and the U.N. can act, it is because the United States and other member nations demand it; where he fails, it is because the members don’t demand it, or they disagree among themselves. The great powers take credit for the actions, and blame the failures on Annan and the U.N. It demands a particular kind of character to serve as the world’s scapegoat for two consecutive five-year terms, and the book poses the question of whether the U.N. has a future, or whether the Bush administration’s repeated warnings of its impending irrelevance are, in part self-fulfillingly, correct.
Traub takes a minimally optimistic view: The U.N., though diminished in stature, is not irrelevant. But some readers may come away from the book more sanguine than the author himself about the U.N.’s chances. The organization’s existential crisis in early 2003, when its bitter divisions in the face of U.S. demands for an authorization to invade Iraq seemed to portend collapse, looks far better in retrospect, as that invasion has been revealed as a colossal error. And U.N. involvement on a variety of fronts over the past several months, including North Korea, Darfur, Congo and global warming, suggests that while the organization may often be ineffective, it remains indispensable.
As Traub recounts, this is hardly the first time the U.N. has faced a crisis of relevance. It has never lived up to its founders’ vision of a proactive international security organization. The Cold War froze the Security Council, and the first few secretary-generals were inoffensive creatures. The exception, the maverick Dag Hammarskjöld, pushed through an aggressive 1960 U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Congo that, while arguably successful, was so bloody that it scared the U.N.’s member states away from such ventures for a generation. Hammarskjöld, killed in a plane crash during the fighting, was succeeded by ineffectual figureheads.
Meanwhile, decolonization transformed the General Assembly into a body dominated by the Third World, especially the non-aligned “G77″ countries. The G.A. was thus frequently at odds with the Security Council and its mainly European and American permanent members. And the U.N. gave birth to a series of agencies — the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. Population Fund, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, etc. — that attempted to accomplish humanitarian and development goals while being yanked this way and that by the political demands of the member countries. Poor countries treated U.N. agency staff positions as sinecures for their elites. Rich countries, especially the U.S., threatened to withhold funding unless the agencies adhered to their ideological agenda.
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new optimism. With Russia and China now amenable to cooperation with the West, the Security Council seemed capable of fulfilling its original mandate of forceful intervention. Such hopes were dashed by the disastrous U.N. peacekeeping experiences in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. The failure in Somalia was blamed on excessive adventurism; those in Bosnia and Rwanda, on excessive timidity. Liberal internationalists in Europe and America were furious with U.N. headquarters for refusing, in Rwanda and Bosnia, to authorize their blue-helmeted peacekeepers to use force to protect civilians. But third-world governments opposed any non-consensual interventions as a violation of sovereignty. With the Dayton Accords, the Clinton administration turned decisively toward humanitarian intervention, and against Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Francophone Egyptian who had vetoed airstrikes in Bosnia. When his first term expired, the U.S. maneuvered Boutros-Ghali out in favor of the less prickly Annan, the Anglophone head of the U.N.’s peacekeeping operation, whom it expected would be more amenable to American wishes.
Traub thinks the Americans were unprepared for what they got. Annan turned out to be a quiet but methodical advocate for the U.N. with an unexpected kind of star power. When he was elevated to secretary-general, the far-right isolationist wing of the Republican Party was reaching the apogee of its opposition to the U.N., complete with myths about “black helicopters.” In concert with Clinton administration U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Annan reached out to then-Sen. Jesse Helms, who had been leading an effort to slash the U.S.’s contribution to the U.N. if it failed to undertake a range of practical and ideological changes. Annan and Holbrooke ultimately won Helms over, and neutralized the anti-U.N. faction in Congress — for a while.
Meanwhile, Annan was pushing the U.N. toward a rethinking of its doctrine on intervention. Here, he found himself caught between the interests of the powerful Euro-American bloc, which wanted U.N. approval for its interventions in places like Kosovo, and the G77, which considered sovereignty rights absolute. Annan carefully edged toward a stance supporting human rights over sovereignty rights, tipping his hand with his September 1999 opening speech to the General Assembly. At the time, third-world nations roundly denounced Annan’s speech. But by 2005 every U.N. member endorsed the so-called Responsibility to Protect: the principle that the international community had a duty to protect people against their own murderous governments. Traub cites U.N. official John Ruggie’s characterization of Annan as a “norm entrepreneur,” gradually shifting the terms of global debate, not through direct confrontation, but by subtly reshaping the moral landscape.
Annan pursued the same strategy in the field of development with the “Millennium Goals,” which emerged from the 2000 Millennium Summit of world leaders. The summit won, among other things, commitments from the world’s wealthy nations to increase foreign aid to 0.7 percent of their countries’ GDPs, while slashing poor countries’ foreign debt. And poor countries committed to meeting concrete development goals of their own by 2010, an incentive for their governments to improve fields like education and health or face public embarrassment. But the fact that, six years on, most of these goals are nowhere near being met points out the weakness of Annan’s norm entrepreneurship: Such norms can quickly come to resemble so much hot air if there is no real political will behind them.
For those who take a sour view of Annan, his willingness to embrace hot air and his aversion to conflict are his defining characteristics. That view took hold among hawkish Americans in early 1998, when Annan flew to Baghdad for frantic negotiations with Saddam Hussein to avert a looming war over Saddam’s restrictions on U.N. arms-control inspectors. (Annan won an agreement, but Saddam soon reneged, and the Desert Fox bombing campaign ensued.) Annan was similarly unable to act forcefully enough to punish his son Kojo when it emerged that he had lied about his employment with a Swiss firm that benefited from the corrupt U.N.-administered oil-for-food program in Iraq. Annan has a notorious inability to fire people; his closest officials have been with him for decades, and when he was pushed to fire one of his deputy secretary-generals, he ended up promoting her instead.
Traub’s book really kicks into gear in the aftermath of the Security Council’s confrontation over the invasion of Iraq. Angry American conservatives push investigations into the Oil-for-Food program in order to depict the U.N. as collaborating with Saddam’s regime. Annan is driven into a depressed funk as the investigation of his son Kojo tars him personally. His attempt to get the U.N. involved in post-invasion Iraq leads to the bombing deaths of dozens of U.N. staff, some of them personal friends. Headquarters staff are bitter at Annan for allowing the U.S. to yank the U.N.’s chain; the U.S., his former patron, now sees him as part of the U.N. problem. But Annan gradually hauls himself, and the organization, out of this funk, establishing a panel to hash out a deep program of comprehensive reform. He pushes long-standing senior staff members aside in favor of a new reformist cadre, appointing the dynamic head of UNDP, the British Mark Malloch Brown, as his new No. 2. (This in turn leads some staffers to accuse Annan of abetting an Anglo-American putsch.)
It is in this sequence that the great merits of Annan’s slow, inclusive but relentless mode of persuasion become apparent. The driving force behind the U.N. reforms is American, and to some extent European, anger at the organization’s corruption and listlessness. But the only internal U.N. constituency for reform comes from a number of countries that want to win permanent seats on an expanded Security Council, for reasons of prestige — Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and a coalition of African countries. Annan deftly insists that these countries advance the broader reform program as the price for continued work on Security Council expansion. Over a period of months, he nudges the reform package through working groups that water it down into a set of proposals with broad, if unenthusiastic, assent. At each step along the way, Annan uses sympathetic contacts in the U.S. State Department to ensure that the proposals are acceptable to Condoleezza Rice. The target is to approve the reforms at the World Leaders Summit, the follow-up to 2000′s Millennium Summit, in September 2005.
And then, in the summer of 2005, the new U.S. ambassador John Bolton descends upon U.N. Headquarters, more or less like a bat out of hell. Many Americans of an internationalist bent were dismayed at the Bush administration’s choice of the combatively unilateralist Bolton, who had famously stated in the early ’90s that if 10 stories were lopped off of the U.N. Headquarters building, no one would notice. But after his failed confirmation hearings and recess appointment, Bolton dropped out of the headlines. It was a poor choice, many felt, but how much damage could one guy do?
Traub provides the answer: Bolton was a disaster, not just for the U.N., but for the U.S. Arriving after the reform document had been largely agreed upon, in discussions involving over a hundred member countries, Bolton suddenly announced he wanted more than 140 changes in the final document. He wanted all references to the International Criminal Court deleted. He wanted references to wealthy countries’ Millennium Goals commitments of increased foreign aid taken out.
Annan and the reform party in the U.N., who had been carefully clearing the document’s language with the U.S. State Department, were shocked. Bolton seemed to have a different agenda than Rice. What did the U.S. actually want? Did it even know? In any case, the effect of Bolton’s new demands was the opposite of what he intended: They opened the door for obstructionist third-world dictatorships to introduce their own objections. Countries like Cuba, Algeria and China were unhappy with U.S.-driven efforts to reform the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. They had gone along with the reform drive rather than be seen to torpedo much-needed changes, including Security Council expansion. But now that the U.S. could be blamed for the reforms’ failure, all bets were off. Bolton’s incompetent diplomacy had succeeded in holding the U.N. reform process hostage to Fidel Castro.
Traub’s depiction of Annan’s battle of wills with Bolton, as the September 2005 deadline draws near, is nothing short of thrilling. It’s like watching a practiced cowboy break a mustang. By the time Annan has Bolton tied down so he can whisper gently in his ear, the U.N. reform package has suffered considerable damage. But a package is passed, and the momentum for further reform is kept alive.
Liberals and other internationalists will enjoy watching Annan redeem himself, and the U.N., with a victory over the arch-neoconservative Bolton. It’s the satisfying ending to Traub’s version of “Great Expectations,” with Annan at last defeating his selfish American benefactors, who raised him up and then tried to control him. But the dirty secret, for internationalists who have experience with the U.N., is that we know Bolton was partly right. A large proportion of the U.N.’s staff is occupied in doing nothing of any value, and the U.N. as an institution has very little power except where its member nations want it to. The U.N.’s own top staff recognize this. Traub quotes Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown: “The fact is, I do think what a lot of people do here is basically crap. Being in this position, I’ve discovered how bad things really are.”
The flip side of such criticisms, however, is that nothing can be accomplished in a multilateral institution like the U.N. with threats and ultimatums. Moving the U.N. does require the occasional dose of Boltonesque straight talk, but what it requires much more is a very un-Boltonesque willingness to engage in agonizing negotiations, to pay people compliments they don’t deserve, to embrace hot air. In the aftermath of Bolton’s resignation in early December, some of his opponents magnanimously praised him as a sincere man. The genius of “Best Intentions” is to show how Annan’s willingness to skirt or stretch the truth, in order to advance the U.N.’s principles of humanitarianism and global cooperation, represents a different and, in this case, more powerful kind of sincerity.
In a resolution approved in January, the Republican National Committee characterized the United Nations’ Agenda 21 as “destructive strategies for sustainable development.” Included in this resolution was the RNC’s condemnation of the “insidious nature” of Agenda 21, and the recommendation by the RNC to adopt this resolution at the 2012 RNC Convention. An increasing backlash against this 19-year-old nonbinding U.N. plan shows how a conspiracy theory can become part of a major party’s platform.
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.’”
A top Palestinian official said Wednesday that President Mahmoud Abbas had no plans to agree to a delayed vote on his bid for membership in the United Nations, rejecting mounting pressure from the United States and France.
The Palestinians plan to submit their letter of application on Friday when Abbas is to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, but he faced a withering lack of support as the world body opened its annual meeting. President Barack Obama said there could be no “shortcuts” in the quest for Middle East peace, a message that was echoed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“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.
BOSTON — President Obama should not veto Palestinian national aspirations in the United Nations Security Council.
The president is not wrong in thinking that this would be better handled in negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. It would be wonderful if Israel itself were to sponsor a Palestinian state, but this is not going to happen as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power.
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.
The last fugitive sought by the U.N. Balkan war crimes tribunal was arrested by Serbian authorities Wednesday, answering intense international demands for his capture and boosting the country’s hopes of becoming a candidate for European Union membership.
Former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic was taken into custody as he met a man delivering him money in a forest in a mountainous region of northern Serbia where many of his relatives live, authorities said. He had dramatically changed his appearance and was armed but did not resist, they said.
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.
McMansions endangered from on high (Credit: iStockphoto/Dmitry Galanternik) 
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds his hands to his face as U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during the 66th session of the General Assembly at United Nations headquarters Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)(Credit: AP/Seth Wenig) 
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Millennium Hotel in New York during the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Andrew Burton)(Credit: AP) 
A Palestinian waves a flag during a demonstration in the West Bank, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011 
FILE - In this Feb. 6, 1993 file photo, Goran Hadzic, who heads representatives of the Krajina Serbs, talks with reporters at the United Nations in New York, United States. It has been reported on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by Serbian TV station B92 that authorities have arrested Goran Hadzic, the last remaining fugitive sought by the U.N. war crimes court. Hadzic has been on the run for eight years. He is wanted for atrocities stemming from the 1991-1995 war in Croatia. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)(Credit: AP) 
