When the bullets from the guns of police officers Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd wounded but did not kill gunman Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood on Thursday, a few centimeters of chance resulted in what will now be months (or more) of discussion and deliberation of personal attitudes toward Islam for many Americans, and much grief for many American Muslims.
Had the shots from the guns of officer Todd or Munley killed Major Hasan, the media and America would have spent a few days or weeks focused on the tragedy, non-Muslims would have read and watched and pondered (or re-pondered) their feelings towards Islam, Washington would have held some hearings, some liberals would have engaged in hand-wringing over “misinterpreted” tenets of the Muslim faith, some conservatives would have suggested new tests of allegiance, and by the end of November, the nation and the world would have mostly moved on.
But Maj. Hasan lives, and will face a trial and probable execution. And because he lives, he complicates the American foreign agenda and our general domestic amicability.
The first factor, already being discussed on Fox News and conservative radio, (and soon to be discussed everywhere) involves the degree of trust non-Muslim America will from this point forward offer devout Muslim-Americans. If Hasan recovers, faces trial, sits on death row, and is ultimately executed, his crime will continue to grind away on us, and permeate a good deal of American discourse, both by the media and by the water cooler. Muslim-Americans will begin to feel something like Japanese-Americans felt in World War II, scorned and distrusted by many other Americans. (And oppressed as they were, Japanese-Americans in 1942 even had an advantage over today’s Muslim-Americans regarding actual evidence: No crazed Japanese-American gunman killed 13 U.S. soldiers on U.S. soil.)
Another problem is of our own making but unavoidable: We are about to create the most famous Muslim-American martyr in history. Assuming he survives his wounds and is not found mentally incompetent to stand trial, this devout Muslim will face American justice. And it won’t be the standard American court room. Maj. Hasan will be court-martialed by the U.S. military, a fact I’m sure to be noted with contempt by many Muslims and Muslim media outlets across the globe, as disdain for the U.S. military increases as each day passes with U.S. troops on Muslim soil and our drones above their heads.
Hasan will be found guilty and will almost certainly receive the death penalty. And if we know about him so far is true, Maj. Hasan will rejoice at his martyrdom, and radical Muslims in the Mid-East and beyond will have yet another scab to pick in their war of ideas.
Domestically the argument will soon reach a level of distrust of Muslim-Americans our country has not seen since Manzanar. On his execution day, demonstrations of protest (and celebrations of his martyrdom and “heroism”) will take place across the Middle East.
There have been no military executions since 1961, but if found guilty Maj. Hasan must die. His death will not help America’s cause. It will rub raw the America values vs. radical Muslim beliefs conflict. The killing of 13 American military people, an act virtually every American considers evil, is and will continue to be seen by many radical Muslims as an act of honor and heroism.
So brace yourself. The Western world is finding itself in a spider’s web of growing proportions with no exit. Last week five British soldiers were murdered in Afghanistan by an Afghan policeman on their side. We can’t trust our allies in Pakistan. And many of the people of Afghanistan—the people we liberated, more or less—grow angrier at us all the time.
The hatred of the American and NATO military will continue to spread. And Thursday’s events in Texas thicken the web in which we are ensnared by bringing the Muslim-Western values conflict solidly within our borders. As time goes on, Osama Bin Laden’s vision of war between Islam and the West seems to grow more real.
Because Major Hasan did not die on Thursday, America is about to enter a long period of heated debate over Islam, its true values, and ideology. We are about to witness arguments on if Muslim-Americans in the U.S. Military can be trusted. Like our conflict in Afghanistan, the issue will become yet another sticky strand of the spider’s web which ensnares us. A situation without any real resolution. And a reminder to many of the way we treated Japanese-Americans less than 70 years ago, another era in which we were afraid and very angry.
Our current military onslaught into the Muslim world began in late 2001. At that time, many of our endeavors (the ones in Afghanistan) were necessary. But our military attacks and diplomatic initiatives in that post-9/11 period required a critical missing ingredient. They had to be executed with tactical brilliance and strategic innovation. Unfortunately, thanks to the likes of Tommy Franks, Donald Rumsfeld, L. Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, David Frum, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, George Bush, and others long on ideology but short on vision, they were not. Eight years later, we are deeply mired in a bloody conflict of war, ideology, and religion. Until last Thursday, we thought of this mess currently as an overseas mess. After last Thursday, we see the conflict closer to the way Bin Laden has always seen it: As a war between Islam and the West. The ultimate mess.