How Lebanon's Eighties Shaped the Middle East and the World
Peter Germanos
On the morning of January 18, 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, stepped out of the elevator near his office in College Hall and was shot from behind by two gunmen. He was 52 years old, a scholar of the Arab world, born in Beirut to parents who had taught at the same university, a man who loved Lebanon and chose to stay when others fled. There was no real investigation. More than four decades later, the question of who killed him, and why, has still not been fully answered.
Kim Ghattas, the Lebanese journalist who covered the Middle East and American foreign policy for the BBC and wrote Black Wave and The Secretary, has returned to that morning in her new book, The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America's Undoing in the Middle East, published by Henry Holt in the United States on October 13, 2026, and by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom on October 22. Across nearly five hundred pages, she follows the Kerr family, including his son Steve Kerr, the celebrated NBA coach, through their long search for the truth. Around that private grief she builds a much larger story: the 1982 Israeli invasion, the arrival of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa, the hostage takers and bombers of those years, and the American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump who inherited the consequences.
Her central idea is one I share completely. Beirut in the 1980s was not merely the stage of a civil war. It was the place where the alliances and the hatreds that would shape the Middle East for the next forty years first took form. I would go further than she does, and I want to state my own conclusion plainly.
The first defeat of American power
The 1980s in Lebanon marked the first time that Khomeini's revolutionary Iran, together with the leftist, communist and other currents hostile to the West that were then active on our soil, succeeded in striking a real blow against American dominance. And they succeeded not on a battlefield, but through terror.
In April 1983 the American embassy in Beirut was destroyed by a suicide truck bomb. Sixty three people died, among them much of the CIA's Middle East expertise. On October 23, 1983, another truck loaded with explosives drove into the Marines barracks near the airport, killing 241 American servicemen, while a simultaneous attack killed 58 French paratroopers. The claim came from a shadowy name, the Islamic Jihad Organization, a front for the networks sponsored by Tehran that would later be known as Hezbollah. Three months later Malcolm Kerr was murdered, and responsibility was again claimed in the name of Islamic Jihad. Then came the kidnappings: journalists, diplomats, priests and professors seized from the streets of West Beirut and held for years.
Each of these acts carried a message. The professor, the diplomat, the soldier and the teacher were all targets, because each represented an idea of openness that the revolution in Tehran wished to erase from our country. The American University itself, one of the jewels of Lebanese civilization, was turned into a symbol to be punished.
The retreat that changed everything
And how did the most powerful nation on earth respond? In February 1984, only weeks after Kerr's death, President Reagan ordered the Marines out to ships offshore, and soon they were gone. There was no serious retaliation against those who planned and financed the barracks bombing. The guns of the battleship New Jersey fired at hills in the Chouf, but the command centres of the Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek remained untouched. The men who had killed hundreds of Americans watched the fleet sail away.
As a former judge and military prosecutor, I learned one lesson above all others: a crime that goes unpunished is not closed. It is an invitation. Impunity is not neutral. It teaches the criminal that his method works, and it teaches every other would be criminal to imitate him.
That is exactly what happened. The American withdrawal handed a victory to Khomeini's Iran and to all its allies on the left and in the camp hostile to the West. It gave them the conviction that America could be humiliated and expelled, not only from Lebanon but from anywhere. From that conviction grew what I can only describe as a supremacist ideology at the heart of the Iranian regime, a doctrine that holds that the Islamic Republic is destined to drive the United States out of what its leaders like to call West Asia, and to dominate the peoples who live there. In my view, this ideology belongs to the same family as the great totalitarian creeds of the last century: it divides humanity into the pure and the condemned, glorifies death, and treats smaller nations, including my own Lebanon, as mere platforms for its ambitions.
The lesson that reached Afghanistan
The lesson of Beirut was not learned only in Tehran. Osama bin Laden, a man of a very different sect and an enemy of Iran in many respects, drew exactly the same conclusion. In his 1996 declaration of war against the United States, he taunted American leaders by asking where their courage had been when the explosion in Beirut took place in 1983, recalling the Marines who were killed, and he went on to cite the American withdrawal from Somalia as further proof that America would run when bled. In his 2004 message to the American people, he even claimed that the idea of striking the towers came to him while watching the destruction of towers in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion of 1982.
In other words, the road to September 11, 2001, passed through Beirut. The terrorists of every stripe studied what had happened on our soil and concluded that you could strike America, kill its citizens, and never pay the price.
What it cost Lebanon
We Lebanese paid first and paid most. The retreat of the West left our country to the mercy of foreign occupations and foreign militias. Our state was hollowed out. Our army was divided. Our sovereignty was bargained away in capitals that were never ours. Decisions of war and peace were taken outside our institutions, and our young people grew up thinking that weapons outside the state were normal. The murder of Malcolm Kerr was not only an American tragedy. It was the murder of a certain Lebanon: the Lebanon of universities, of pluralism, of Christians and Muslims learning side by side, of a country that faced the world with confidence rather than fear.
A Lebanese patriot cannot read this history without anger. Not anger at America for coming, but anger that it left, and that it left without justice. When a protector abandons the field, those who stayed behind become hostages, sometimes literally.
The price of not facing your enemy
There is a moral that runs through Ghattas's book and through the four decades that followed. When you do not confront your enemy, when you retreat and tell yourself that the problem will go away, the price you pay later is almost always higher than the price of facing it on the spot. America avoided a confrontation in 1984 and paid in the Khobar Towers, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, in the attack on the USS Cole, in New York and Washington, and in the long wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Lebanon avoided a reckoning and paid with its very statehood. The confrontation with the Iranian regime that the region is living through today is, in a real sense, the bill for 1983 finally coming due, with interest.
As a Catholic, I do not glorify war. Our faith teaches that peace is the fruit of justice, not of surrender. A just order requires that the innocent be protected and the guilty be held to account. Appeasement is not peace. It is merely the postponement of a larger war.
Why this book matters
Kim Ghattas has done something important. She has taken one forgotten murder and shown that it was a window onto the whole age. She reminds us that before the headlines of today there was a professor shot in a university corridor, a family that never received justice, and a superpower that chose to look away.
These years must be studied, in Lebanon, in Washington, and in every capital that still believes terror can be managed rather than defeated. Our students should read this history, and our leaders should learn from it. Lebanon will only recover its sovereignty when its state alone holds the decision of war and peace, when crimes are investigated and judged, and when we stop allowing foreign regimes to turn our land into the front line of their ideology.
Malcolm Kerr believed in Lebanon. The least we can do, forty two years later, is to tell the truth about who killed him, about the regime that made such killings possible, and about the retreat that let it believe it could win.
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