Thirteen dead and 28 wounded
would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and a great
victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the
biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for
soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is
not merely a "tragedy" (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of
a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since
9/11, the "war on terror." Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill
America's enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home
by, in essence, the same enemy – a man who believes in and supports
everything the enemy does.
And he's a U.S. Army major.
And his superior officers and
other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was
just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that
"the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor" (i.e.,
his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the
"noble" "heroism" of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting
the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some
kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the
base.
When it emerged early Thursday
afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared
shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking
formulation: "Please judge Maj. Malik Nadal [sic]by his actions and not
by his name."
Concerned tweeters can relax:
There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense
that the New York Times' first report on Maj. Hasan never mentioned the
words "Muslim" or "Islam," or that ABC's Martha Raddatz's only
observation on his name was that "as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as
one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'"
What a strange reaction. I
suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all
retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the
bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of
Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of
this man.
Since 9/11, we have, as the
Twitterers, recommend, judged people by their actions – flying planes
into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London
Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on
the whole we're effective at responding with action of our own.
But we're scrupulously
nonjudgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a
building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the
heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like "radical
Islam" or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old
"radical extremism." But we never make any effort to delineate the line
which separates "radical Islam" from nonradical Islam. Indeed, we go to
great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur
the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An Army psychiatrist,
Maj. Hasan is an American, born and raised, who graduated from Virginia
Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. But he opposed
America's actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan and made approving
remarks about jihadists on U.S. soil. "You need to lock it up, Major,"
said his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.
But he didn't really need to
"lock it up" at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if
any "red flags" were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of
people are "anti-war." Some of them are objectively on the other side
– that's to say, they encourage and support attacks on American
troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are
U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope.
Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali,
a man who approvingly quotes such observations as "If I saw an American
or British man wearing a soldier's uniform inside Iraq I would kill him
because that is my obligation" is an adviser to Britain's Crown
Prosecution Service (the equivalent of U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this
week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned that, on flying from
the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of
her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed
that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: "We are
not to question Shariah."
That's the guy manning the
airport security desk.
In the New York Times, Maria
Newman touched on Hasan's faith only obliquely: "He was single,
according to the records, and he listed no religious preference." Thank
goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had "Allah"
and "another word" pinned up in Arabic on his door. "Akbar" maybe? On
Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Quran to
his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired.
But don't worry: As the FBI
spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there's no terrorism angle.
That's true, in a very narrow
sense: Maj. Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of
al-Qaida reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he
were, things would be a lot easier. But the same pathologies that drive
al-Qaida beat within Maj. Hasan, too, and in the end his Islamic
impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric
training, his military discipline – his entire American identity.
What happened to those men and
women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the
best-trained, best-equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by
a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the
problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no
strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy – in
Afghanistan and in Texas.
©MARK STEYN
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