Demystifying Hasan in Three Parts
1. Is it unheard of for soldiers in an army to kill their fellow fighters?
In 2005, American soldiers killed Captain Phillip Esposito and 1st Lieutenant Louis Allen by placing a Claymore mine on Esposito’s office window at Forward Operating Base Danger in Tikrit, Iraq.
The euphemism “friendly fire” — can there be a such thing as friendly gunfire? — refers to when soldiers in the “fog of war” mistakenly or negligently kill their fellow fighters or allies. The most prominent example is the 2004 death of Pat Tillman, a former NFL star. That is death was by friendly fire was initially covered up by the military.
Some friendly fire killings are considered more derelict than others. From wikipedia:
In the Tarnak Farm incident of April 18, 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight others injured when U.S. Air National Guard Major Harry Schmidt, dropped a laser-guided 227-kilogram (500 lb) bomb from his F-16 jet fighter on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry conducting a night firing exercise near Kandahar. Schmidt was charged with negligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty of the latter charge, was fined nearly $5,700 in pay and was reprimanded. During testimony Schmidt blamed the incident on his use of “go pills” (authorized mild stimulants), combined with the ‘fog of war’.
The point of relating these is that there is a history of military personnel killing people on the same side. There is a clear range of intentionality, from the most purposeful to the accidental. Such “fratricide” has a long history within the US military.
Both intentional and accidental killings are usually motivated by self-preservation. Fragging is often directed against unpopular commanders and especially those who put their soldiers in danger’s way unnecessarily. Friendly fire in the “fog of war,” as with Pat Tillman, is motivated by a will to self-preservation.
2. This bring us the case of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30 American soldiers before they could deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it much more shocking than these acts?
Before he himself can explain the Fort Hood murder spree, two major narratives and one lesser one has emerged. One version is that Hasan has been trying desperately to get out of military service and wanted to avoid deployment to Afghanistan (or is it Iraq?) at all costs. Some speculate what he heard from treating veterans impacted him. This is supported by the fact that he retained an attorney and sought to buy out the remainder of his contract with the military, which was an obligation due to their funding his education. This was rejected by the military, and he was to be deployed to a place he deeply resented.
The other story is that he became a Muslim extremist who was driven in opposition to US foreign policy — not that those two are equivalent by any means since there are people of all religious faiths and non-faiths who deeply oppose America’s imperialism. But, I digress. This story is bolstered by accounts from former classmates who claim he was against the wars. There is a quote from a chatroom conversation in which a Nidal Hasan shows sympathy towards suicide bombers, and compares them to a soldier to sacrifices his life by jumping on a grenade. And it recently is being alleged he yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. Some, mainly Fox News pundits and their ilk, argue the cause is “jihadism.”
The other, less prominent story-line, is that he was angered by anti-Arab and anti-Muslim harassment he received from his fellow soldiers.
A look at the facts — including the fact that he’s been in the military for two decades, having joined right out of high school — seems to suggest the first story is the best. Also, reports that he mainly targeted particular individuals — while spilling the blood of “collateral damage” — give clue to his motives. If he were driven by religious zeal and faith, there would be no individualized targeting. Thus, this is something like fragging. In light of his legal efforts to leave the military, this attack should be seen as in line with the rich tradition of military fratricide for the sake of self-preservation.
What am I suggesting? I am not saying Hasan is therefore guilt-free or that his victims deserved to die, but that his actions, besides being the biggest such base shooting in history, fits within a long-established history of fratricide in military history. It is not a function of his identity.
And though I think that no one should serve in wars of occupation and oppression, American Arabs and Muslims have served in the military through these wars to such an extent that the Fort Hood killings are clearly extremely marginal. As Chapman points out, if religion was the motive, “incidents like this would be common, not rare.”
This analysis so far does raise an immediate objection. What about the fatalistic nature of his attack? A self-preservation explanation does not account for the fact that he knew he was going to die. Perhaps he feared the trauma and cognitive dissonance of serving in Afghanistan more than he feared death. And it is possible that his religiosity made him accept this fate — which is very different than saying religion or his identity motivated him.
Or, there could be another explanation, he himself was driven to insanity by what he feared about going to Afghanistan.
Unlike the growing number of soldiers taking suicide as the way out, perhaps being “othered” by his fellow soldiers even after two decades in the service pushed him to direct his anger outward through violence. As one columnist suggested, he “was an isolated, angry misfit with grievances and guns.”
3. I myself place this shooting spree within the context of the general sentiment of war fatigue, which gives it a sort of significance that friendly fire does not have, but that fragging might. The state of the wars is that few see them as right. They are seen as problems the country must extricate itself from; yet it cannot seem to pull it off because not everyone is on board. There are other intertial forces: national pride; vested interests in war; ideological warriors who are still fighting a straw-man ghost; and incompetent planted leaders.
Everyone sees Afghanistan as a ridiculously doomed adventure; some of us saw that it was mistaken from the start. Though I accept the United States had just cause to retaliate against the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attack, they did not have the right to level countries and collectively punish populations in doing so.
I sympathize with those who lost loved ones on all sides and want to see them as martyrs. However, I cannot help but see that what’s at stake — the government of a landlocked and backwards country wracked by decades of civil war — has simply meant that all the killing has amounted to a waste of lives. As cruel and barbarian as the Taliban is, the Afghans will need to sort this out over the long haul. The only legitimate and grounded change will come from below.
Iraq was a war started on false pretenses, and has produced some good — though at a cost of one million Iraqi lives is far from worth it.
Americans long ago felt they exercised the post-9/11 psychic need for vengeance and their military acted out against targets, taking down innocent bystanders in the process. Was Major Hasan acting that much differently? Was he not acting out of what he felt were just motives, his own grievances and attempts to leave the military, and out of a similarly skewed sense of self-preservation? He, like Americans after 9/11, were driven by a fear of danger of the unknown, and uncertainty of their safety and sanity.
It is too bad that quagmires, by definition, are easier to enter than to leave. The entrance into Iraq and Afghanistan now seemsrash and destructive, terms one would have to use to discuss the Fort Hood shooting.
The difference is Hasan was stopped. The American military-industry complex is on auto-pilot, crunching lives and spitting them out along the way.
Hasan’s spree cannot be divorced from this context, at the very least seen in parallel. It cannot be treated as some mono-causal act based only in his religion, ethnic identity, insanity, or grievances. To some extent, our times are insane, and this is the more urgent problem to which we need attend. We must condemn murderous logic, whether acted on by a lone gunman or as the basis for state policy.
My analysis does not trivialize the lost lives and injuries sustained. In fact, I imbue them with a level of meaning and significance the media have not; their mourning is a false one, an routinized one. They will soon shift their attention to the newest hot story. Their insincerity is marked by their lack of concern for underlying causes; they express this by false, ad-driven outrage; just as Obama’s ironic use of the word “horrific” projects that he is against horror. When the captain of two military occupations condemns senseless violence, it is loaded with insincerity.
My mourning is not just for Fort Hood’s victims, but for the victims of the military they serve, and their fallen compatriots forced to fight wars of elite-level choice. To isolate their victimhood and suffering is to bring about more in other places.
This shooting was a sign of the times, about a war less and less people think is worth the sacrifice. Under my reading here, the underlying policy frameworks should be changed, or else more lives will inevitably go to waste.
Unlike the major Arab-American and Muslim organizations, I do not just condemn the killing spree, but I condemn the whole culture and industry of institutionalized violence Fort Hood is but one piece of. Major Hasan was part of that and acted under a similarly deadly logic of the righteousness of self-preservation.
Excellent piece Will. Thank you.
Do you not detect any fallacies in this line of reasoning?
Will, excellent piece, except what "good" has the iraq war produced at all?
I agree, the argument about Hasan was great, but I also wondered about this statement, as well as the description of Afghanistan as "backwards."
In general though, one of the most reasoned and sober pieces I've read on the topic.
Sunbula and Yaman,
As for some good coming out of Iraq's occupation, I was thinking of relative improvements in Shia political representation and Kurdish self-determination; also Saddam Hussein's regime was gruesome without a doubt. So there was some good and to deny that would be inaccurate. And to ignore the much greater cost of this good — the deaths of so many people — would be criminal. I can see why such an analysis shocks some. I am not sure any outcome would justify the extent of death and destruction visited there. And those why say it was worth — a la Albright on the sanctions — sound similar to the cold, murderous calculations of Stalin or Mao.
As for Afghanistan being backwards, I know the term has bad connotations, loaded with ethnocentrism and elitism, etc. I meant it as a place of with so little development, ruined infrastructure, and few trappings of modern life. This is not a function of Afghan people, but the logical result of three decades of foreign invasions, bombardments, and civil war. Any country invaded by the Soviet Union and then the United States, and fighting a civil war regional and international powers treat as a proxy would be backwards. It is de-developed. I did not intend the term as a cultural judgment.
Will
UPDATE: One of the first detailed accounts from inside: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/11/for...
It suggests he was not looking for individuals but was shooting anyone he could rather calmly. He did not hear "Allahu Akbar." It also rejects any political explanations, such as mine.
Why not use Occam's razor? Hasan decided to become a "martyr" and go on a suicide mission. That is the simplest explanation. You of course would reject that because then the motive is tied tightly to what Hasan is, an Arab religious fanatic.
You can spin this as much as you like and try to blame our "times" or whatever. There have always been bad times. During the second world war the Japanese in the US were treated badly while civilians in Japan were being slaughtered. Not one Japanese American killed fellow Americans. If the "times" are responsible, then what are the chances that it would be an Arab religious nut that would do it? There are so few of them in the US armed forces.
Other Muslims and Arabs in the US are of course not guilty of anything. But you will be lying to yourself if you ignore the clear pathologies of Arab civilization that are at the root of many such atrocities.
More information comes to light…
Suspect told 'There's something wrong with you'
There was the classroom presentation that justified suicide bombings. Comments to colleagues about a climate of persecution faced by Muslims in the military. Conversations with a mosque leader that became incoherent.
After arriving at Fort Hood, he was conflicted about what to tell fellow Muslim soldiers about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, alarming an Islamic community leader from whom he sought counsel.
"I told him, `There's something wrong with you,'" Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "I didn't get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn't seem right."
Danquah assumed the military's chain of command knew about Hasan's doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan's "anti-American propaganda," but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.
"The system is not doing what it's supposed to do," said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master's program in public health at the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out."
…a picture has emerged of a man who was forcefully opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was trying to get out of his late November deployment to Afghanistan and had struggled professionally in his work as an Army psychiatrist.
Twice this summer, Danquah said, Hasan asked him what to tell soldiers who expressed misgivings about fighting fellow Muslims. The retired Army first sergeant and Gulf War veteran said he reminded Hasan that these soldiers had volunteered to fight, and that Muslims were fighting against each other in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.
"But what if a person gets in and feels that it's just not right?" Danquah recalled Hasan asking him.
It was obviously a Muslim issue
Finnell said he did just that during a year of study in which Hasan made a presentation "that justified suicide bombing" and spewed "anti-American propaganda" as he argued the war on terror was "a war against Islam." Finnell said he and at least one other student complained about Hasan, surprised that someone with "this type of vile ideology" would be allowed to wear an officer's uniform.
But Finnell said no one filed a formal, written complaint about Hasan's comments out of fear of appearing discriminatory.
"In retrospect, I'm not surprised he did it," Finnell said. "I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were."
"We're short of officers, particularly at the major and lieutenant colonel level because of the war, and we're short of psychiatrists," said Rostker, who served as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Clinton administration. "There would have had to be something very detrimental in his record before there would have been a banner that would have said, 'No, we don't want to promote him.'"
Both military and civilian investigators have yet to talk with Hasan, who reportedly jumped up on a desk and shouted "Allahu akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great!" — at the start of Thursday's attack. He was seriously wounded by police and transferred Friday to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and officials said late Saturday he was no longer on a respirator.
"Hopefully, they can put together the pieces and find out what in the world was in his mind and why he went crazy," Danquah said. "Aaaaah, it's sad. Those soldiers could have been my soldiers."
Obviously his being a Muslim conflicted him in such a way that led to this attack.
(CBS/ AP) Soldiers who witnessed the shooting rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead reported that the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as he fired
Hasan’s spree cannot be divorced from this context, at the very least seen in parallel. It cannot be treated as some mono-causal act based only in his religion, ethnic identity, insanity, or grievances. To some extent, our times are insane, and this is the more urgent problem to which we need attend. We must condemn murderous logic, whether acted on by a lone gunman or as the basis for state policy.
Trying to compare the murderous acts of a crazy gunman to the brave service of men and women in Iraq or Afghanistan is disingenuous and pathetic. The military are bravely fighting a dangerous and evil enemy in a war zone, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a coward who shot unarmed men and women for no reason (except he was Muslim).
He did not act out of a similarly deadly logic of the righteousness of self-preservation – he went crazy and did something very evil. There was no logic or self-preservation, certainly nothing righteous about it. How is it any different from the Columbine massacre? Oh, he was Muslim.
You have demonstrated your disrespect and acrimonious contempt for American military men and women serving their country with these comments.
What a bunch of shit, Will. The man wasn't in combat or even in a combat zone when he went on his killing spree. Furthermore, he's never even been deployed over seas and wasn't even trained for combat. The Army sent him to MEDICAL SCHOOL (and paid for it, while he was receiving his full pay and allowances too! That's as big a free ride as anyone can ever get in the US!) and Medical Doctors are prohibited by law from engaging in a combat role as they are considered protected persons under the Geneva Conventions. So even if he had been sent to a war zone (which he hadn't been!) he would not have been sent into combat.
There's simply no parallel to other acts of violence in the US military for you to be drawing comparisons to. The man is a psychopath and seems to have been motivated by his Islamic beliefs to commit the act he committed. If he'd just wanted to avoid being sent to war he would have deserted. Instead he went on a killing spree and obviously intended to keep murdering people until he was killed… and I bet he'd call that "martyrdom", don't you agree Will?
Murderer kills fellow Murderers!
bIG dEAL…. i got other fish to fry.
This is why Muslims shouldn't be allowed in the country.
What Maj. Hasan did cannot be justified in any sense. What he did, even if he believes that it was right and in accordance with the Islamic teachings, was ABSOLUTELY AGAINST ISLAMIC TEACHINGS. His act has disgraced the name of Islam and questions are being raised on the loyalty of more than 20,000 Muslim soldiers in US Army along with hundreds of Muslims residing in the US.
ISLAM NEVER CALLS FOR KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE NOR THOSE SOLDIERS WHO ARE NOT FIGHTING THE WAR. ISLAM CALLS FOR PEACE AND JUST BECAUSE OF SOME BLACK SHEEP THE RELIGION MUST NOT BE BLAMED.
One more question….
Was Christianity blamed for the actions of Hitler when he massacred 6 million Jews?
Why the double standards?
Did Hitler ever say he was killing the Jews in the name of Christianity?
Maj. Hasan was yelling "Allahu Akhbar" during the shooting.
This is why people associated the attack with Islam.
Even if Maj. Hasan said "Allahu Akbar" at the time of shooting it never justifies his actions. Im a Pakistani and my people have and are suffering greatly at the hands of mindless people who are killing their own countrymen belonging to the same religion. Their actions can never be taken as representing the Islamic teachings.
As far as Hitler is concerned, he too killed other Christians apart from Jews. But it does not mean that Christianity teaches hatred and mindless killing. We Muslims respect Jesus as Messenger of Allah who preached peace and harmony just like Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) did after Jesus.
It is unfair to associate religion with the acts of one person.
Whats the matter you filthy zionist shit eating white faggot son of a bitch? Now you know how millions of your victims around the world feel.
Big deal, no one gives a shit about you ameriCunt terrorists going to hell.
Hell doesn't exist, but that's beside the point.
Don't want war? Don't give us a reason to destroy you.
[...] Friendly fire in the âfog of war,â as with Pat Tillman , is motivated by a will to self-preservation. 2. This bring us the case of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30 American soldiers before …More Here [...]