Reuel Marc Gerecht has nicely demonstrated that the massacre perpetrated by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (and when, I wonder, will the Fort Hood gunman be stripped of his martial honoric?) could have been easily avoided had U.S. authorities conducted themselves more like the French: "A concern for not giving offense to Muslims would never prevent the French internal-security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which deploys a large number of Muslim officers, from aggressively trying to pre-empt terrorism." Known to the FBI in advance, in other words, was the fact that Hasan was correspondent with a radical Yemen-based imam who sympathizes with Osama bin Laden and computes a metaphysical kill calculus with respect to American soliders serving overseas, whose mounting deaths, we were first led to believe, first impelled the cracked but conscientious Hasan to rampage. (That a man so badly in need of headrest should find cranial solace on Salafist prayer mats was first dismissed as coincidence by news commentators.) Known, too, was that an eagerness not to give offense to the peaceful Muslim population in this country was at the heart of law enforcement malaise, which led to yet another gruesome and demoralizing Islamist attack on American soil.
So to Robert Wright's tortured logic--that U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "create" men willing to slay and die for Allah and that by ending these wars we will end the casualties of jihad at home--we already have the simple rebuttal that those casualties can be ended by having the government do its job, make good on its information, and round up potential or aspiring jihadists before they commit mass murder. Have we learned nothing since George Tenet's legendary remark that the 9/11 hijackers had better not be those shady characters milling about flight schools in Florida? No, rather the mode of surveillance and preemption continues to be a page out of the grimly hilarious Onion satire, "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer."
But Wright makes an even more telling observation:
One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.
Of what war can this not be said to be the case? From the maid of Saragossa in the Napoleonic conquest of Spain (the technology then was the human mouth and poetry) to the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in Israel to those many bodybags in the Baghdad morgue, incendiary images always manage to reach the people "who will be most inflamed" by them. That's why they're called incendiary. And that's why the word propaganda exists and why the stuff itself requires no magic for delivery. Or does Wright mean to say that Muslims are so much more sensitive to this age-old concept that they rule out confrontation at all costs? If so, then what Wright is arguing for is cultural exceptionalism and political correctness as the guiding tenets in the war on terror-- or the war on the "terrorist meme" as he clunkingly calls it--the very tenets that allowed Hasan to scheme with impunity in the first place.
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