Thanassis Cambanis, Hezbollah, Terrorism, and "Engagement Hawks"

WNYC recently reported on Hezbolah, and asked Cambanis to opine on the subject. The following is a podcast summary: Veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis discusses the cross section of people that make up Hezbollah—part standing army, part political party, and part theological movement. >A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel looks at the organization and the people it includes, and Cambanis follows a few Hezbollah families through the 2006 war with Israel in order to get a fuller understanding of the ideological and religious roots of the conflict in the Middle East.. See the WNYC webpage on this feature here. Download the podcast here. See also: Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics), Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies Table Our Journey Through the Middle East, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Cambanis recently wrote in the Boston Globe: There's an increasingly assertive group of “engagement hawks” — a group of professional diplomats, military officers, and academics — is arguing that a mindless, macho refusal to engage might be causing as much harm as terrorism itself. Brushing off dialogue with killers might look tough, they say, but it is dangerously naive, and betrays an alarming ignorance of how, historically, intractable conflicts have actually been resolved. And today, after a decade of war against stateless terrorists that has claimed thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of foreign lives, and cost trillions of dollars, it’s all the more important that we choose the most effective methods over the ones that play on easy emotions. See that Boston Globe article by Cambanis here.