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 Hizb'allah 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 Hizb'allah, the guerrilla and terror group that is, as one Israeli general has said, "the greatest in the world" at what it does.
- From The Age of The Unthinkable: Why The New World Disorder Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo
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