U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) testifies during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing to be secretary of state, on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 24, 2013.

WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 2:47pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has hinted it might try Middle East peace-making once again, but Secretary of State-designate John Kerry is likely to move cautiously, in contrast to U.S. President Barack Obama's failed, high-profile first-term initiative.

While the possibility of another failure may hang over the White House, Kerry suggested this week that time was running out for a two-state solution with Israel living alongside a sovereign Palestinian state. He said it would be "disastrous" if it did.

When Obama came into power in 2009, he made peace between Israelis and Palestinians a priority, visiting the State Department two days after taking office to announce his choice of former Senator George Mitchell as his special envoy.

Four years later, the president has little to show for it.

Formal talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians broke down in 2010 within weeks of resuming. Mitchell resigned in 2011 and both sides have since taken steps that have antagonized the other - Israel by building Jewish settlements on land the Palestinians want for a state and the Palestinians by seeking enhanced status at the United Nations.

Against this backdrop, former senior U.S. peace negotiators said they expect Obama to proceed cautiously and to let Kerry, who will be sworn in on Friday, take soundings for any fresh effort. That could allow Obama to avoid investing too much personal capital in a fresh effort until there was a prospect of real progress.

"I believe that Kerry and Obama are committed and interested in doing something," said Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who advised Democratic and Republican secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from 1982 to 2003.

However, Miller said the two sides were too far apart right now for any big initiative to succeed and that a more circumspect approach made more sense.

"Unlike last time around ... (Obama) is going to be quite patient and deliberate in avoiding the mistakes he made during his previous run, which is why it's really hard right now ... to predict the arc of any sort of big initiative," he said.

While neither Kerry nor Obama have specified what approach they plan, some of Kerry's allies outside government have suggested that he wants to move aggressively.

Miller and other former U.S. diplomats interviewed said they were not privy to what plans, if any, the two men might have.

However, they said Obama's second term offered a new chance with Kerry, a new chief diplomat who has made no secret of his interest in the Middle East, and that the January 22 Israeli elections created a somewhat better environment for peace despite the intrinsic challenges.

Having watched the peace process unfold, and unravel, from his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over the last three decades, analysts said Kerry has a deep knowledge of the issue and its players.

Among the obstacles are the divisions within the Israeli and Palestinian societies about making peace; a sense of disbelief that peace itself may ever be possible; and the rise of Islamist parties, notably in Egypt, that may be less supportive of it.

'DISASTROUS'

At his January 24 confirmation hearing, Kerry said "my hope ... my prayer is that perhaps this can be a moment where we can renew some kind of effort to get the parties into a discussion."

"We need to try to find a way forward, and I happen to believe that there is a way forward," he said, but added:

"I also believe that if we can't be successful, the door ... to the possibility of a two-state solution could shut on everybody and that would be disastrous."

The two-state solution refers to the idea of Israel living alongside a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories it seized in the 1967 Middle East War.

To achieve this, the two sides would have to agree on borders, Jewish settlements, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, compromises that have eluded them for decades.

Martin Indyk, vice president of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, said there were signs of Obama's skepticism about the odds for peace. He cited a piece by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in which Obama is reported to have said "Israel doesn't know what its own best interests are."

Indyk said that if Obama believed "that the prime minister of Israel doesn't have the best interests of Israel at heart, is a political coward, isn't going to take risks for peace - if that your basic view, why would you bother, why would you try?"

"On the other side is John Kerry's belief that the window is closing on the two-state solution and that it is an obligation of the United States to try to stop that from happening, at least to preserve the hope of a two-state solution," he said.

'TESTING THE WATERS'

"The combination could lead to a willingness on the part of the president to have the secretary of state try again, but rather than jump in ... it's likely to be a testing of the waters," Indyk, the former top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East as well as a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said.

The fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies lost ground in Israel's election while centrists did better than expected suggested Israel's next coalition government may tilt more toward peace-making.

"I actually think that this election opens doors, not nails them shut," outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday, adding that a significant number of Israelis were signaling a desire for different approach on peace with the Palestinians as well as on domestic policy.

Dennis Ross, a long-time U.S. Middle East peace envoy now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, said one danger would be if the Palestinian society evolved toward an Islamist rather than a nationalist identity.

"The combination of disbelief on the part of each side and the issue of the future identity of the Palestinians being at stake argues for making an effort," he said. "I think that it's likely that the new secretary of state will make an effort."

(Editing by Warren Strobel and David Brunnstrom)

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1 of 9. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (R) meets International peace envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus December 24, 2012 in this handout photograph released by Syria's national news agency SANA.

BEIRUT | Thu Dec 27, 2012 2:52am EST

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sent a senior diplomat to Moscow on Wednesday to discuss proposals to end the conflict convulsing his country made by international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Syrian and Lebanese sources said.

Brahimi, who saw Assad on Monday and is planning to hold a series of meetings with Syrian officials and dissidents in Damascus this week, is trying to broker a peaceful transfer of power, but has disclosed little about how this might be done.

More than 44,000 Syrians have been killed in a revolt against four decades of Assad family rule, a conflict that began with peaceful protests but which has descended into civil war.

Past peace efforts have floundered, with world powers divided over what has become an increasingly sectarian struggle between mostly Sunni Muslim rebels and Assad's security forces, drawn primarily from his Shi'ite-rooted Alawite minority.

Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Makdad flew to Moscow to discuss the details of the talks with Brahimi, said a Syrian security source, who would not say if a deal was in the works.

However, a Lebanese official close to Damascus said Makdad had been sent to seek Russian advice on a possible agreement.

He said Syrian officials were upbeat after talks with Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League envoy, who met Foreign Minister Walid Moualem on Tuesday a day after his session with Assad, but who has not outlined his ideas in public.

"There is a new mood now and something good is happening," the official said, asking not to be named. He gave no details.

Russia, which has given Assad diplomatic and military aid to help him weather the 21-month-old uprising, has said it is not protecting him, but has fiercely criticized any foreign backing for rebels and, with China, has blocked U.N. Security Council action on Syria.

"ASSAD CANNOT STAY"

A Russian Foreign Ministry source said Makdad and an aide would meet Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Mikhail Bogdanov, the Kremlin's special envoy for Middle East affairs, on Thursday, but did not disclose the nature of the talks.

On Saturday, Lavrov said Syria's civil war had reached a stalemate, saying international efforts to get Assad to quit would fail. Bogdanov had earlier acknowledged that Syrian rebels were gaining ground and might win.

Given the scale of the bloodshed and destruction, Assad's opponents insist the Syrian president must go.

Moaz Alkhatib, head of the internationally-recognized Syrian National Coalition opposition, has criticized any notion of a transitional government in which Assad would stay on as a figurehead president stripped of real powers.

Comments on Alkhatib's Facebook page on Monday suggested that the opposition believed this was one of Brahimi's ideas.

"The government and its president cannot stay in power, with or without their powers," Alkhatib wrote, saying his Coalition had told Brahimi it rejected any such solution.

While Brahimi was working to bridge the vast gaps between Assad and his foes, fighting raged across the country and a senior Syrian military officer defected to the rebels.

Syrian army shelling killed about 20 people, at least eight of them children, in the northern province of Raqqa, a video posted by opposition campaigners showed.

The video, published by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, showed rows of blood-stained bodies laid out on blankets. The sound of crying relatives could be heard in the background.

The shelling hit the province's al-Qahtania village, but it was unclear when the attack had occurred.

STRATEGIC BASE

Rebels relaunched their assault on the Wadi Deif military base in the northwestern province of Idlib, in a battle for a major army compound and fuel storage and distribution point.

Activist Ahmed Kaddour said rebels were firing mortars and had attacked the base with a vehicle rigged with explosives.

The British-based Observatory, which uses a network of contacts in Syria to monitor the conflict, said a rebel commander was among several people killed in Wednesday's fighting, which it said was among the heaviest for months.

The military used artillery and air strikes to try to hold back rebels assaulting Wadi Deif and the town of Morek in Hama province further south. In one air raid, several rockets fell near a field hospital in the town of Saraqeb, in Idlib province, wounding several people, the Observatory said.

As violence has intensified in recent weeks, daily death tolls have climbed. The Observatory reported at least 190 had been killed across the country on Tuesday alone.

The head of Syria's military police changed sides and declared allegiance to the anti-Assad revolt.

"I am General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal, head of the military police. I have defected because of the deviation of the army from its primary duty of protecting the country and its transformation into gangs of killing and destruction," the officer said in a video published on YouTube.

A Syrian security source confirmed the defection, but said Shalal was near retirement and had only defected to "play hero".

Syrian Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim al-Shaar left Lebanon for Damascus after being treated in Beirut for wounds sustained in a rebel bomb attack this month.

(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam; Writing by Alistair Lyon; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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