THE BEST KIND OF AMERICAN: A True Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East, by Kim Ghattas
Why, in 1984, did Iran have its Lebanese proxies kill Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut, when he arrived at its campus on a sun-kissed promontory that symbolized the city’s debonair charm? That Kerr was exceptional among his compatriots for his superlative Arabic and deep sympathy for the Palestinians seemed, perversely, to be the target on his back; he didn’t conform to the Islamic Republic’s depiction of Americans as universally and unthinkingly pro-Israel.
As Kim Ghattas writes in “The Best Kind of American,” her chronicle of Lebanon’s turbulent recent past, there was “no room” for “high-profile bridge builders” in a country that had been torn apart by Israeli occupation and civil war. Aside from his educational role, Kerr had been quietly investigating the disappearance of his friend David Dodge, another A.U.B. luminary, who was bundled into a car in 1982 and eventually spirited away to Tehran. Kerr’s pursuit of the clandestine links between Iran, the Syrian dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad and militant Lebanese groups such as Islamic Amal and Hezbollah was also reason for him to die.
A seasoned Lebanese journalist who uses sources in English, Arabic, French and Persian, Ghattas is well qualified to tease out the insidious relationships of ideology, convenience and betrayal that have condemned Lebanon to half a century of instability — and which periodically, and with stunning violence, drag the world’s attention back to this pinprick in the eastern Mediterranean.
What, for instance, connects Dodge’s abduction to a French scholar named Michel Seurat, whose kidnapping culminated in his death in captivity in 1986, and to the 63 people, mostly Lebanese, who were killed by a car bomb that destroyed the U.S. Embassy in 1983? All of them, it turns out, fell afoul of the same Shia militant, Imad Mughniyeh, who was himself killed in 2008 by a car bomb in Damascus and honored with a huge funeral in Beirut.
For all his ruthlessness and daring, Mughniyeh was a mere operative. As Ghattas shows, he answered to Iranian diplomats in Damascus. What elevates her book from a litany of atrocities to a sophisticated exploration of political violence is her interest in the intersection between those who were doing the killing, hijacking and dying and those who, from labyrinthine corridors and plush gilt seats, controlled them.
A small place like Lebanon rarely drives history; it is a theater in which others act out their designs. One such actor was the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, who used the country as his center of operations until he and his group were expelled in 1982. Other outsiders, notably agents and political leaders from the United States, Israel, Iran, Syria and the Soviet Union, also “pursued conflicting interests with troops, militias, money and influence,” Ghattas writes.
No one emerges with much credit as Ghattas widens her lens, from President Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed his refusal to negotiate with terrorists but authorized secret arms sales to Tehran — in the hope, usually forlorn, of securing the release of American hostages — to the Islamic Republic and its Syrian ally, burrowing deeper and deeper into the Lebanese body politic.
Then, of course, there is the Jewish state, whose double games also included arming its Iranian enemy. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon; the occupation would last 18 years and set a precedent for all subsequent interventions, Israel and its adversary Hezbollah acting in diabolical symbiosis to keep Lebanon’s institutions in a state of chronic enfeeblement.
Amid the horrors, Ghattas gives us delicious images: a youthful Hassan Nasrallah, who would later become Hezbollah’s feared leader, heading a delegation to play Ping-Pong in Iran; the captive passengers of a hijacked TWA airliner, dispersed around Muslim Beirut and killing time by watching “Dallas.” Occasionally her brisk style falters; one wishes an editor had struck out her “sparks that would sink Israel and America into the Lebanon quagmire.”
Few personify the cynicism of the era better than Assad, a secular strongman who got into bed with the Shia fundamentalists of Iran and an opportunist who basked in Reagan’s gratitude when the T.W.A. hostages were released despite the fact that the hostage takers were creatures of the Syrian state. With Assad’s death in 2000, the regime stayed brutal but became inept, his son and heir Bashar losing first Lebanon and much of Syria, then, in 2024, the presidency itself.
Ghattas’s assessments are shrewd. Arafat’s expulsion from Lebanon left a vacuum in the country “he had loved and wrecked in equal measure.” Israel’s decision to supply Iran with modest amounts of arms throughout the 1980s is not as strange as it seems; a small but imperishable part of the Jewish state longed to reinstate Iran as the “friend and strategic partner” it had been under the shah. A resident of Beirut — where she “screamed in surprise” when her windows were jolted by the ongoing Israeli airstrikes that killed Nasrallah in 2024 — Ghattas clearly shares the disappointment felt by the French scholar Seurat when it dawned on him that his Shia captors were “no longer truly Lebanese,” as she puts it, but converts to the alien ideology of Iran.
Ghattas’s heroes are Kerr and Seurat: Both rejected Iran’s doctrine of divinely ordained conflict as well as Edward Said’s celebrated skewering of Western scholars of the Middle East in his polemic “Orientalism.” Like Kerr, Seurat was an “innocent” who sought to “close the gap between civilizations,” Ghattas writes, but while in some respects the gap has indeed narrowed since the 1980s, this has been brought about less by knowledge and integrity than by the exercise of economic and military might. If the best kind of American is one whose view of the Middle East is disinterested, benevolent and untainted by thoughts of commercial or strategic hegemony, Ghattas’s excellent book commemorates a breed that is all but extinct.
THE BEST KIND OF AMERICAN: A True Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East | By Kim Ghattas | Holt | 470 pp. | $32.99
The post The Professor Who Knew Too Much. And Wound Up Dead. appeared first on New York Times.
