The New World Disorder

Paula Bronstein / Getty Images What do Hezbollah and Google have in common? In an excerpt from The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo argues both organizations draw the best minds of a generation.

The thick coffee, in two small gilt-edged cups and with that bitter bite of near-burnt Arabic chicory, has gone cold. We are sitting more or less in silence, each of us thinking, staring idly at a muted television nearby. It is the early fall of 2008, and the headlines, even on the station we are watching—Al Manar, the TV channel of Hezbollah here in Lebanon—are about the global financial crisis. Fouad and I have a settled peace about us at the moment, the slow calm of an early afternoon, each of us getting ready to return to our respective lives. He will, when he leaves, go back to his work as a chief of information technology for Hezbollah, the guerrilla and terror group that is, as one Israeli general has said, “the greatest in the world” at what it does.

The passion for innovation and the geeky curiosity of fighters like Fouad reminded me of friends of mine who had started great Internet companies or people I knew who were managing gigantic hedge funds.

Fouad and I have had a long conversation about the Koran, about the demands of martyrdom, about his sense of himself as “already dead,” simply walking the earth doing the work he is meant to do before ascending to heaven, probably at some moment chosen in Tel Aviv. We’ve talked about his children and his brothers and sisters. He has asked me questions about China, which is where I live and is a place he wants to understand better. I had come to see Fouad because, in all my dealings with Hezbollah over the years, I had found myself particularly fascinated and intrigued by their capacity for creativity and innovation, even in the pursuit of shocking ends. Their obsession with finding better ways to fight and survive under the full pressure of Israeli attack seemed to me a signpost of sorts, but I had always struggled to figure out what precisely it marked. It meant, at the least, a record of defeat for the Israeli army. In 2006, for instance, fewer than 500 Hezbollah fighters had frustrated a 30,000-man Israeli attack, including one of the most extensive air campaigns in Middle East history. Hezbollah, to prove their point, had made a show of firing the same number of missiles on the last day of the war as they had on the first.