Obama and Arab-Israeli diplomacy

There has been a lot of speculation in Washington these past weeks about the content of the Arab-Israeli stance we might expect to see from the Obama administration. I have followed this speculation as closely as just about everyone, and have the following observations to make:
1. It is still far too early to make any concrete predictions at all. All we know so far is the content of the top-level appointments he announced on December 1, to his foreign affairs and national security team, and the prominent mention he made in that announcement of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
2. What we still do not, very significantly, know is how exactly the responsibilities will be divided between Hillary Clinton at State, and Gen. Jim Jones as NSC adviser. All we know is that Hillary asked for, and got, an assurance that she would have direct access to the Prez whenever she needs it. Which is not at all the same as saying that she will over-rule Jones, who will have direct access to the Prez as a matter of course and who is expected to play a strong role as NSC adviser.
3. One of my working assumptions is that Hillary might be expected to be more accommodationist than Jones to whatever government is in power in Israel, and more reserved than him about articulating the United States’ own strong interest in the conclusion of a final, conflict-ending, and claims-ending peace in the region. I might be wrong. But she has been a close and good friend of AIPAC for a long time now. Jones, meanwhile, gained important, firsthand experience into the (previously often dysfunctional) dynamics of the US-Israel-Palestine triangle during his work on revamping the PA’s security apparatus in Jenin. He is a high-level military man with considerable leadership experience, not someone whom Hillary can easily roll right over. (Also, his military experience and stature will be an important asset to Obama as Obama tries to figure out how to deal with the Israelis.)
4. Dennis Ross has worked hard to get himself “mentioned” as possible Arab-Israeli diplomacy czar in many publications in the US, Israel, and elsewhere (including, today, here.) Dennis has been a staunch Clinton-ite ever since he opportunistically jumped ship straight from George Bush I’s failed re-election campaign in ’92 to the Clinton camp. He did a workman-like job on Israeli-Arab diplomacy so long as he was closely supervised by Sec. of State Jim Baker, but once he rose higher on the feeding chain his own preferences were always for (a) lengthy delay in the conclusion of a final peace agreement– argued for in the name of “ripeness theory” and the need for very lengthy “confidence building” before the final negotiations even start; and (b) trying to split the Arab parties off from each other and play each off against the others in a classic “divide and rule” way.
5. However, despite all this “mentioning” and other forms of speculation, we still really do not know anything about how Obama intends to pursue his stated goal of a speedy move toward a final Israel-Palestine peace. And I suspect much of that “mentioning” might backfire.
6. We will not know the content of the policy until we hear additional substantive statements from the President-elect and/or see the next echelon down of Middle-East-relevant appointments being announced, with the lines of their responsibility also clearly established.
7. Given the urgency with which Obama spoke about the need for a final Israel-Palestine peace he may well have hoped to have more pieces of that policy (as in #6 above) in place by now. But the economic crisis has been overwhelming everything else on his agenda in the past couple of weeks. We still have 37 days to go before the inauguration. I am sure we will learn more before then.

Jimmy and ME

from Forward.com
Former president Jimmy Carter is back with new advice for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The former president is scheduled to publish a new book on the issue — slated for release on January 20, coinciding with the inauguration of Barack Obama.
The title for Carter’s new book, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work,” seemingly suggests a more optimistic tone than that of his previous book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”
“I was going to call it, ‘Yes, We Can.’ My wife talked me out of it,” Carter said in jest, during a December 3 discussion in Atlanta.
No details were provided on the content of Carter’s new book, but based on recent remarks by the author, it is clear that his approach toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has not changed. According to an Associated Press report, the former president pointed, in the December 3 discussion, to the “persecution of Palestinians” and lack of American active involvement in the Middle East as the main sources for instability in the Muslim world.

Continue reading “Jimmy and ME”

Khomeini of Palestine

In this BBC report, I saw some quotes used from a former member of the Al-Aqsa brigades whose given name was “Khomeini.” Not surprisingly the young man’s age was given as 29.
It takes me back to when I was working in Beirut in ’78. So many of the Palestinians there were euphoric about the downfall of the (strongly pro-Israeli) Shah. Yasser Arafat incorporated the theme of “Today, Tehran; tomorrow Jerusalem!” into all his rhetoric… Small surprise that this young man’s parents– like, I’m guessing, many others in the Muslim world– gave their son the name of Khomeini that year.
1978 was also the year of the Camp David agreements. I remember that one mother in heavily Shiite South Lebanon gave birth to triplets, and the family were so optimistic about the prospects of regionwide peace after the accords were signed that they named the babies “Carter”, “Begin”, and “Sadat.”
H’mmm. I wonder whether those guys are still walking around with the monickers they were given that year?
(I find it significant that Khomeini Abu Amera, 29, of Jenin never judged it necessary to change his name even during the extremely bloody eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.)

Obama’s foreign affairs team and Arab-Israel diplomacy

His foreign affairs team comes, now, as no surprise. But what was welcome in his speech in Chicago today was the prominent mention he made of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
That’s especially welcome, coming a few days after the veteran Clinton-era peace processor Aaron Miller came out swinging with a public argument that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is just too difficult, so Obama shouldn’t even make any effort at reaching it but should focus on brokering a Syria-Israel peace instead.
Let’s hope wiser heads prevail! Significant though a Syria-Israel peace would be, by far the greater worldwide symbolism– and by far the greater actual, continuing human suffering— attaches to the horrible structural and physical violence of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Plus, once there’s a final peace between Israel and Palestine, an Israel-Syria deal can fall into place extremely easily. (Its parameters have long been well known.)
The reverse is decidedly not the case.
So if a choice has to be made between the two tracks, Obama should plump for the Palestine track as the highest priority.
But here’s an important idea: Why should he feel he needs to make some kind of a contrived “choice” between the two tracks, anyway?
Why not aim at a speedy, grand settlement of all the outstanding portions of the Arab-Israeli dispute, all at once?
This is really not such a radical idea. In the great peace settlements of earlier eras– 1815, 1919, 1945, etc– huge numbers of outstanding disputes, some of them of very lengthy duration, were all resolved together, as a kind of a “package deal.”
Compared with those earlier, continent- or globe-girdling grand settlements, resolving Israel’s outstanding conflicts with Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon “all in one fell swoop” looks very do-able indeed, almost picayune. And right now, with the Saudi peace plan of 2002, there’s a great vehicle for getting into that comprehensive negotiation.
President Obama could also build on the precedent of the 1991, Bush-I-era Madrid peace conference, which also aimed at a comprehensive settlement of all the outstanding tracks of the Israeli-Arab dispute.
One big advantage of this approach, compared with trying endlessly– yet again!– to take partial or incremental steps along each of the tracks separately is that the “pain” of the settlement, in terms of the concessions that all the parties will need to make from their long-held political positions, will be a one-off thing, rather than a scary and continuing “death from a hundred cuts.” Meanwhile, the “gain” of the settlement, in terms of the huge relief the citizens of all these countries will win from the burdens of war, occupation, and international estrangement, will be much more definitive and palpable than any “gain” they could reasonably expect from partial settlements.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety will also breathe huge new life into the relationships Israel has with Egypt and Jordan, which remain very strained even though both those countries have long had formal peace treaties with Israel.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety on terms that are fair and enshrine the key principles of human equality, international legitimacy, and a commitment to setting aside all forms of violence will allow Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, and all the other peoples of the Middle East to breath a huge sigh of relief… to build new kinds of relations with other… and to move into a much more hopeful future.
So that’s why I’m glad Barack Obama put such an emphasis on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not that the Israel-Syria track is insignificant. It’s not. But it’s a dangerous illusion to think that brokering peace on that track could be any kind of a substitute for doing the hard diplomatic work that’s so urgently needed on the Palestine track.
Actually, it’s an even more dangerous illusion to believe that any “peace broker”– whether it continues to be overwhelmingly the US or shifts to being a more genuinely international effort– has to make a “choice” between pushing on the Palestine track or the Syria track.
Go for the whole grand Arab-Israeli settlement, Obama! That is the way to truly transform the Middle East– as well as our country’s relationship with the whole of the rest of the world.

Let’s see the audacity in Obama’s Mideast policy, too!

I loved Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today.
He was arguing that Barack Obama could learn a lot from studying the record of the “New Deal” policies enacted by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the economic crisis of the 1930… And in particular, from the fact that FDR’s economic policies almost failed– because they weren’t bold enough, soon enough.
Krugman makes a strong case for this argument, at both the economic and political levels. But reading the column, I thought an almost exactly similar case could be made regarding Middle East policy.
For the past 16 years, US diplomacy regarding the Middle East has been both atomized and painfully incrementalist. Under both Clinton and George W. Bush, the US government sought to keep its policy on Iraq and the Gulf as separate as possible from its policy on Arab-Israeli affairs; and within the domain of Arab-Israeli affairs it worked hard to keep each of the negotiating tracks separate while giving Israel ample time to stall and stall forever on all of them.
The policies pursued by Washington in both the Arab-Israeli theater and the Gulf region have failed. Now, if the war-battered peoples of this vital region are to see their lives stabilized, then a much broader and bolder approach should be used.
The Baker-Hamilton report of December 2006 certainly recommended this. It’s time to pull it off the shelf quickly– along with the records of the old Madrid Conference of 1991, and prepare for a whole new, Mideast-wide stabilization effort… To be undertaken in close coordination with the other four permanent Members of the Security Council.
Obama has written about “the audacity of hope.” So now, to keep the hope alive, let’s have some real audacity of diplomatic action.

Middle East: US losing ‘Control’?

Two fascinating– and hopeful– items of Middle East news this morning. First, Syria, Israel, and Turkey have all confirmed that senior officials of Israel and Syria have been holding “proximity talks” on final-peace issues in Turkey since Monday.
Second, the Lebanese faction leaders and representatives who have been talking in Doha, Qatar since Sunday, have now announced their agreement on an package deal covering the three issues of: (1) getting the long-agreed presidential candidate Gen. Michel Suleiman finally inaugurated into office, (2) the make-up of the next cabinet, and (3) the rules for the next parliamentary election.
These items of diplomatic news are significant for these reasons:

    (1) In both cases, an entity that the Bush administration has been seeking to completely exclude from political participation has been included in a substantial way in this process. That is, Syria, and Lebanon’s biggest political party, Hizbullah.
    (2) In both cases, the mediation has been done by a non-American government that is (and remains) broadly friendly to the US, but with little regard for the preferences that the Bush administration has expressed very vociferously regarding the “exclusion” aim described above.

So it’s not the case that any anti-US forces are “taking over” the Middle East. But it is the case that Washington, which has long succeeded in exercising complete control over all the region’s “peace diplomacy” has now lost the ability to do that.
One earlier attempt by a pro-US power to do something broadly parallel to what the Qataris have achieved regarding Lebanon came in February 2007, when Saudi Arabia succeeded in brokering a “National Unity Agreement” between the Palestinian Fateh and Hamas movements.
On that occasion, Washington was furious, and stepped up its efforts to arm and train the pro-US Fateh people so they could retake the Palestinian polity by force. (They did succeed in breaking up the National Unity Government, but they left Palestinian society sorely wounded and badly divided.)
On this occasion, I’m not quite sure what cards the hardliners in Washington, led by Elliott Abrams, feel they might have left to play. Two facts are relevant to this. First, is the incredibly damaging effects that GWB’s diva-like appearances last week in Israel have had on his administration’s ability to exercise any persuasive sway at all in Arab capitals… And second is the fact that one of the parties going “off the Elliott Abrams-defined reservation” this time round is the Prime Minister of Israel.
I guess the Bush administration will just have to tag meekly along behind him.
Still worth watching for in the days ahead: whether these two diplomatic breakthroughs might also be accompanied by arrival at the long-promised breakthrough in the Israel-Hamas talks? (Pursuit of which by Israel in recent weeks has been another example of Israel going off the Elliott Abrams reservation.)
These are interesting times.

Combustive Mideast mix: Political crisis, meet economic crisis

I want to underline something very significant about the multiple crises now simmering in the Contested (once ‘Fertile’) Crescent that stretches from Egypt through Israel/Palestine, to a lesser extent Syria, and then finishes strongly in Iraq. That is that right now you have considerably heightened political tensions in that crescent, revolving principally around the question of whether US-Israeli power is to be succumbed to or resisted, that come on top of rapidly worsening economic conditions.
It is this combination– plus of course, Pres. Bush’s singularly ill-timed, and Israel-centered visit to the region this coming week– that make the crises potentially more serious than any of the other internal crises of governance this region has seen in recent years.
Thus we have seen:

    In Egypt, on May 4, the Muslim Brotherhood, which in terms of both economic and social policy is fundamentally very conservative, threw its weight behind the anti-price-rise stoppage called by non-MB networks of social-issues activists. That, after the MB notably stood aside from engagement in previous economics-focused public actions.
    In Lebanon, we should recall the confrontations of recent days started with a nationwide protest against price hikes.
    In Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s policy of tightly linking economic issues to issues of political control and domination has continued for so long, and with such viciousness, that it is now just about impossible to disentangle the two. But the economic-political combination there is particularly combustible right now.
    In Iraq, the failure of the US occupation force to allow the rebuilding of a working, livelihoods-focused economy– or indeed, we could say the decisions it took at so many levels to block the re-emergence of a functioning national economy– has contributed hugely, and for more than five years now, to the occupation power losing its political legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq’s citizens. Most recently, and most acutely, the economic/anti-humane suffering inflicted through the occupation power’s aggressive pursuit of plans of military control and quadrillage in Sadr City have forced the whole situation there to a crisis.

What you have in all those parts of the now-Contested Crescent is a US-Israeli-dominated political order that has failed to meet even the most basic economic (let alone political) needs of local citizens.
You could describe this as a small subset of the global economic-political order, which is also to some extent US-dominated, though in the Contested Crescent the political, and therefore also the economic, domination is particularly extensive and all-encompassing.
Around the world, there have been signs of considerable pushback against US policies regarding, in particular, the very basic issue of very basic foodstuffs: policies that in recent months have helped to drive many parts of the low-income world toward starvation.
Thanks to alert JWN commenter Roland for contributing this linkto a Times of India article from May 4 titled: US eats 5 times more than India per capita. The article presents a wealth of data, including a very recent US Department of Agriculture survey that found that, “Each Indian gets to eat about 178 kg of grain in a year, while a US citizen consumes 1,046 kg.”
The story also surveys various disparities around the world in the consumption of other foodstuffs (noting that many Indians are anyway vegetarians.)
It adds:

    the story would not be complete without mentioning the plight of Africa, where foodgrain consumption in 2007 was a mere 162 kg per year for each person, or about 445 grams per day. Don’t forget they are not getting any meat or milk products out there.

That last sentence is probably a little overdrawn. But the sense of the general argument remains… And as a US citizen I have to say I find these figures completely shocking.
But US citizens and everyone else around the world need to understand that food-price issues which are now becoming something of a factor inside the (ever-self-referential) US political system are a much larger issue in the politics of countries and communities that are living closer to the edge of real food insecurity and starvation. And understand, too, that given the dominance that the US undoubtedly exercises over much of the global economy, concerns and resentments that various non-Americans around the world harbor over food-price issues segue almost seamlessly into resentment against the US’s strong and often controlling role in world politics, as well.
This global economic order that the US has built up over the past 63 years is being sharply tested by the current food crisis, and in many parts of the world it is being found wanting. US government actions like the decision to subsidize the conversion of fine American agricultural land to production of the inputs for motor fuel have provoked quite understandable anger around the world. As did Bush’s completely maladroit recent statement about the global food crisis having been in some sense “caused” by the rise in living standards in India and China in recent years. (Right. From what to what, Mr. Bush?)
… So what’s happening in the Contested Crescent these days is all a part of that broader global picture. But in the CC, it strikes me, these issues of economic and political control have come into particularly tight focus, in good part because of the destabilizing presence and actions of the US military and its allies in the Israeli military.
So many people, writing about the present crisis in Lebanon, have tried to portray it as a “sectarian”– or even, in Juan Cole’s bizarre recent post, “ethnic”– conflict. Fundamentally, it is no such thing. It is a political conflict, that is overwhelmingly over this issue of being for or against US domination of the region. Though it does have some sectarian overtones– but no “ethnic” ones at all– these are quite secondary to the political issue at stake. Thus, you’ll find a majority of Shiites back the jabhat al-mumana’a (anti-US) alliance, and a small minority who back the pro-US March 14 movement. The country’s Christians, including its Maronite Christians, are probably about evenly split between Mumana’a and M-14. The Sunnis and Druze probably trend fairly strongly toward M-14, though there are certainly plenty of Sunnis, and some Druze, who are Mumana’a supporters.
FWIW, the Shiites are easily the largest population group in the country. They are historically extremely deeply rooted in Lebanon, where they have three strong centers of demographic concentration.
But the present unrest is notably not just about politics. It is also about the economic crisis that has been gathering force in Lebanon as everywhere else in the Contested Crescent. That is, in large part, why the US currently looks so weak in the region: Because it is blamed, among other things, for having presided over a world and regional economic order that has failed to assure basic food and economic security to the citizens of these countries. There is a disquieting degree of justification to those accusations.
Oh, and the US is also blamed for having invaded and smashed Iraq, and for having connived in Israel’s smashing-up of Palestine.
It looks like huge flocks of chickens of long-time US policies in the region are these days coming home to roost.
On Mr. Bush’s shoulder when he attends Israel’s continuing Independence Day ceremonies next week, perhaps.

M.E. peace mission for Annan, Carter, & Robinson

The group of visionary retired world leaders called The Elders has announced that three of their number– Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and former Irish President Mary Robinson– will be undertaking a peace-focused fact-finding mission in mid-April.
The announcement says the three,

    will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21 to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts.
    The Elders will listen to all parties in the countries. They will meet with leaders from governments, civil society, and key groups that influence the conflict, in an attempt to understand their various perspectives. At the end of the mission, the Elders will prepare a report for the public to help people understand the urgency of peace and what is needed to secure it. The Elders will also meet and begin to work with groups that will reinforce the efforts by the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a peace agreement based on a two-state solution.

I am intrigued by the way they describe their mission there. They notably make zero mention of the very disappointing “Annapolis” peace process. Indeed, it also looks as if that last sentence there was sort of tacked on as a later addendum to what otherwise looks like a very appropriately open-ended, listening-focused mission.
The very best of luck to them. If it would help them, I’d be very to send along any of my writings on the conflicts and the prospects for peace in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine. That would include numerous posts here on JWN, or articles elsewhere, especially my longer articles in Boston Review since 2001; my 2000 book on Syrian-Israeli peace diplomacy; or the 2004 book that I worked on with 13 other Quakers that was basically the result of a three-week listening-centered mission we conducted in Israel and Palestine in 2002.
The very best of luck to them. I have great respect for all three of these leaders. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing both Robinson (when she was at the UNHCHR in Geneva) and Carter. I certainly hope that on this mission these Elders make a point of meeting, and listening carefully to, all the relevant parties in the region including those who are currently judged to be “off-limits” to the diplomats of the US and its allies on the (highly politicized) grounds that they are terrorists. I’ll read the report they produce with huge interest.

Annals of imperial contraction: Aden, 1967

I’m a few days late, but November 30 was the 40th anniversary of the final withdrawal of British forces and power from Aden, now part of a unified Yemeni Arab Republic. That withdrawal was the key step in the dismantling of Britain’s permanent military (naval) presence “East of Suez”, a development whose inevitability became a lot clearer to Brits and others after the strategic failure of the British-French (-Israeli) “over-reach” assault against Egypt 11 years earlier.
The BBC website has an interesting account by veteran reporter Brian Barron of a repeat visit he recently made to Aden, and his reflections on the 1967 withdrawal which he had covered as a much younger journo.
He tells us a revealing anecdote about standing in Aden’s Crater District in 1967 with the notoriously bloody British “counter-insurgency” specialist Col. Colin (“Mad Mitch”) Mitchell, watching as some of the soldiers under Mitchell’s command were…

    stacking, as in a butcher’s shop, the bodies of four Arab militants they had just shot and Mad Mitch said: “It was like shooting grouse, a brace here and a brace there.”

(I wonder: Did Barron report it in that straightforward way at the time, or did he conveniently glide right over that articulation of Mitchell’s brutal mindset?)
Americans, I have found, are a people with not much appreciation for anyone’s history– but especially not for the history of peoples far distant from and perceived as different from themselves. Thus, you have the scenario repeated over and over and over again of eager, fresh-eyed and well-meaning US citizens rushing overseas to work on often well-intentioned projects to bring “modernization”, or “good governance”, or “universal [= western] judicial norms” or whatever to those distant peoples. They seem to imagine that those other societies are a tabula rasa on which American/”western” norms and practices can simply be inscribed. There is little or no appreciation that people in Africa or Asia or the Middle East have seen nearly all of this before. They have seen white westerners come in, protected by the force of heavy arms or other appurtenances of hard power, and proclaiming all kinds of “humanitarian” but often extremely myopic and self-referential projects. They have seen all those phalanxes of young white idealists come in and try to impose their own societies’ norms and projects on indigenous people many years more experienced and wiser than themselves. They have seen the horrendous damage those interventions ended up causing.
Barron’s latest reflection on the British retreat from Aden makes a few unnecessarily chauvinistic points. For example, he refers to “the old Anglican Church [which] is no longer the secret police interrogation centre it became following the British retreat”, but no reference at all to the interrogation centers where Mitchell and his predecessors over the preceding 130 years of British occupation of Aden did all their ghastly work.
Barron concludes with this reflection:

    Looking back we can see the magnitude of Britain’s strategic blunder here. The political, military and diplomatic establishment in the late 1950s and early 1960s misjudged the strength of Arab nationalism, completing a colossal military base despite local hostility.
    There was an absence of reliable intelligence (doesn’t that sound familiar?). As the insurgency turned deadlier, we withdrew – abandoning moderate allies.
    Twenty-three years of police state thuggery followed, with the Soviet KGB replacing the British.
    Even after Aden and the rest of the south merged with North Yemen, there was another civil war in the 1990s. No wonder Aden today seems battered and bruised, and its people frustrated by the follies of their rulers: a forgotten place anchored to a forgotten time.

I find this story-line intriguing. In the first two paras there is some realism and self-awareness. In the third there is some anti-Soviet finger-pointing, which also introduces the justifiability of some kind of an “apres nous la deluge” view of the end of empire. And that view is strengthened and underlined with the last para. Now that the British are no longer in Aden, according to Barron it has slipped out of history: “a forgotten place anchored to a forgotten time.”
Well, maybe Aden has been (fairly conveniently) “forgotten” by many Brits. But how on earth can anyone say it has been “forgotten” by the 800,000 people who live there, or the 21.5 million people in the rest of Yemen? Do they not count as people whose forgetting or remembering we should take into account?
Indeed, the history of Aden is an important one in the anti-colonial narratives of the Middle East and far beyond. The peoples of the Middle East have never forgotten those narratives. Very few Americans, however, have any idea that they even exist.

Ramazani: “Bridging the Divides”

** Updates posted below **
As regular justworldnews readers will recognize, Helena and I have presented and commented on numerous essays here by R.K. – “Ruhi” – Ramazani. Here’s one on Jefferson & Iraq, another on “Making Gulf Security Durable,” and this one on why massive arms sales are not the answer. Tomorrow, he faces a complex heart surgery.
On the eve of this potential life crossroad, the University of Virginia, via UVA Today on-line, published a multimedia tribute to Professor Ramazani’s generous service to students, the University, and to the cause of “understanding” between Americans and peoples of the Middle East.
I especially like Professor William Quandt’s comment at the essay end:

“One of Ruhi’s great hopes has been that he could personally help bridge the divide between the country of his birth, Iran, and the country where has lived for most of his adult life, the United States,” said William B. Quandt, the Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs and an expert on the Middle East. “It remains to be seen whether Ruhi’s hope for reconciliation between the two countries he knows best will take place, but if and when it does, he will have played an important role behind the scenes.”

Several years ago, I published a biographical sketch of how Ramazani’s scholarship has compelling echoes in his own life journey. I hope to have it available on line shortly. I’m also in the early stages of a project to “digitize” the best of his half century of writings for ready access to all via the web.
The UVA Today item includes marvelous clips from a recent interview with “the” Professor himself. (look for the link near the top right) In addition to the quotes on what the University has meant to him, about America’s fixation with “fixing” things, and his ending optimism about the “oneness of humankind,” do enjoy the breathtaking scenery behind him. Warms the heart.
Let’s send our good thoughts, wishes, and prayers for his surgery and speedy recovery. We can endeavor to emulate the bridgebuilder; but not replace him.
****************************
Update as of Sept. 26h, 5:00 p.m. est: Via Ruhi’s family, we are greatly encouragedby the good reports from the outstanding University of Virginia heart surgeons. Ruhi has pulled through the surgery, with even a few positive surprises. Thank you Dr. Kron!
Ruhi, enjoy your “vacation….” :-} We – and the world – still need you.