Dear Friend and Reader:
There stands a conceptual barrier between what happened at Fort Hood on Thursday, and classifying it as terrorism. This is a serious problem, and if confronted, it’s going to call into question all of our myths and delusions about who and what a terrorist is, why they act, and why the United States is supposedly at war against them.
The futility of that war is quite apparent now, since an act of terrorism has come home to a US military base, perpetrated by someone who holds the status of officer in our own services; who was the product of our own training academies; and who was born and raised on our own home ground. If we’re paying attention, we will start to ask whether we’re training and using our own armed forces as terrorists in just the way we think of them as coming from other societies. On the most practical level, this is precisely what has happened. We still keep looking out there for the terrorist, with night vision goggles. Unless we classify Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as an ‘outsider’ merely on the basis of his religious orientation, cultural background or genetic descent (rather than where he was born and bred, and what uniform he wore), we need to start looking for the enemy within ourselves. By all presumptions, this could never have happened. But borrowing from Gen. Turgidson of Dr. Strangelove, we did not count on the human factor.
My own instincts tell me this was all about the human factor. Such would include a sense of tribal injury associated with the war crimes being committed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan; these wars are being fought under false pretenses, and nobody wants to say anything about that. It would include Hasan’s contact, working at Walter Reed, with many of the most severely injured, psychically damaged soldiers, Marines and officers returning from the fronts. These people are suffering mainly from having been put in the position to kill and risk their lives on the basis of a lie; of many lies. It would include the aspect of military life where people are put in that position, without being cut out for that kind of gruesome ‘work’.