Jeffrey Goldberg's 'In the party of God' (part I and part II) published in The New Yorker, (Oct 2002) got the national magazine award for best reporting given out this week. In that article, Goldberg laid out the case that the Hezbollah (not the one based in Kashmir, the one in Southern Lebanon) is the deadliest terrorist organization in the world and has a more successful trackrecord of achieving its political objectives than Al Quida. It is a spine chilling peace of journalism and very well researched.

His Iraq article was also fascinating, exhaustive and controversial. It was used as ammunition by the Bush administration, in the Beltway PR war for intervention in Iraq. Goldberg's access to, and alignment with Pentagon's foreign policy thinkers is total. (Matt Welch had some interesting comments at the time about the article and its naysayers).

It should also be noted here that Goldberg has apparently served in the Israeli army and may have probably cause for enhancing the importance of Hezbollah.

Whatever his political loyalties might be, he certainly knows his way around the murky world of middle eastern politics and that illuminates his Hezbollah articles. Go check them out.