Fareed Zakaria argues eloquently that the real key to securing peace for the Palestinians is effectively sidelining Yassir Arafat:

The most important person who will not be at any of the meetings this week is, of course, Arafat. And make no mistake, Arafat will try to derail this peace process. He has absolutely no incentive to see Abu Mazen succeed. He will try to keep his fingers in the operations of the Palestinian Authority, in particular in controlling the security forces. The day that Arafat swore Abu Mazen into office, he set up a new national-security council, with himself as chairman, controlling all matters related to law and order. He will thwart the efforts to crack down on terror. He might even encourage some groups to engage in low-level terror. The message Arafat will try to send the world is “Abu Mazen is a nice guy but he can’t deliver. If you want to deal with the Palestinians, you have to deal with Arafat.”

Bravo.   Way too many whacko's elevate Arafat - an autocratic thug atop a shaky, internationally supported kleptocracy - to the same level as Sharon / Bush / Blair - duly elected leaders with powers constitutionally limited and rights for domestic minorities guaranteed.   Zakaria sees none of this and recognizes that the man has been given dozens of opportunities over the years and has consistently lost his legitimacy in international eyes. 

There is one big catch, of course - I believe it was Jefferson who said "people get the government they deserve".    There's some serious malaise in the Palestinian territories and whatever it is, it's directly led to the emergence of folks like Arafat.  Still, we can't just back out of a chicken & egg situation and throw our hands up.   We have to start somewhere and the leadership situation is the most accessible lever.

It's nice, of course, that this course of action is almost exactly what the Bush administration laid out as it's plan of attack nearly a year ago.   Sideline Arafat.

UPDATE: I just finished adding the pseudo-Jefferson quote (and alas, after some Googling, I can't quite find it) when I found this article by VDH with an equally applicable warning when dealing with Iraq:

...Still another uncertainty was the disposition and likely reaction of the “Iraqi people.” They were not quite enemies, like the Germans in World War II, but neither were they friendlies like the once-liberated West Europeans of that era. Saddam’s subjects were, perhaps, more like the Italians circa 1943: people who sort of wished to be freed from a dictator—but depending on how quickly, painlessly, and profitably it could be done. In the event, they turned out to be a mixture of all three and something else altogether: on one day sullen if not exactly reluctant supporters of Saddam Hussein, on the next a mass of blameless individuals happy to have been extricated from the grip of their despotic overlords, and on the next looters and destroyers of their native heritage and infrastructure, blaming the Americans for their own license and demanding our immediate exit.