Eight fall guys

When I read that eight Army officers might be reprimanded for failing to notice that Major Nidal Hasan was a certifiable Islamic nutter, I wondered if, in the end, they'd be the only ones punished in connection with the Fort Hood massacre. The administration's fumbling over the trial venue of Khalid Sheik Mohammed is hardly reassuring, nor is a legal system in which Major Hasan--paralyzed from the waist down--seems better positioned to sue the government than the government is to convict him of murder.

So I was much taken by Bret Stephens's counterfactual history of the Fort Hood shooting, published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Mr Stephens imagines an Army in which the eight fall guys were on their toes: they saw in Major Hasan a man about to explode with religious rage, and they duly reported him to the authorities. The mentally unbalanced psychiatrist would have been denied promotion and given an "unsuitable" discharge from military service. Thirteen soldiers would be alive today, in that case--and meanwhile, Mr Stephens persuasively speculates, the Good People would have come down upon the Army in force, crying racial intolerance from a "Christianist" military culture. (The late lamented Ted Kennedy was among those demanding a full investigation of the arrest of the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo for espionage; the charges were dropped, the ex-chaplain wrote a book, and he became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) In this parallel universe, Major Hasan would have written a much-praised book, and the eight fall guys would now be accused of racial profiling. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford