irreconcilable loyalties (3) Major Hasan/ Obama

If it appears startling to have a title that links an Army psychiatrist who opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, with the President of the United States, my thinking was inspired by Polonius' "to thine own self be true" in a play that began with a murder and ended in a few more (perhaps because Hamlet apparently never discovered what "being" meant).

At the time of the Fort Hood tragedy, there was much to do about the anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss, who had died. Like many of his contemporaries he still labored under the Hegelian mantra of synthesis vs antithesis as in "the cooked and the raw."
But he modified the antagonistic aspect of the formula. He was reluctant to use "us/them" and preferred I/we, asking who is the "I" and who the "we." One answer Levy-Strauss came up with and that seems to me hepful in understanding Major Hasan, is "the I is a hateful me," where the "hateful me" was the product of the "we" amongst who he grew up.

The Major, an American of Jordanian descent, must have taken several loyalty oaths on his way to becoming a psychiatrist and an officer in the Army. We actually still don't know much about what kind of a person he was, but presumably not a born radical Islamist. I have gathered a fairly thick folder of information since Hasan hit the news cycle (where he lasted as topic one for about two weeks), but apart from finger pointing at the FBI for not following up recent contacts between Hasan and a radical cleric in Yemen or at his Army colleagues and superiors for not keeping an eye on him, there is no evidence in the public domain to suggest his "conversion to radicalism" occurred long ago and could thus have been a cause for worry. It appears that he accepted the Islamist's thesis that the war on terrorism is a war on the Muslim world, a revival of the Crusades. (But why would an western educated person not know that Christanity is no longer the unified force it may have been a 1000 years ago - the Pope had no armies - or that no fanatic counterpart to Islamism in the West can mount a war on anybody, other than engage in such terrorist acts as killing abortion doctors?)

So we are left with what he did, i.e. having decided that he did not want to be sent to Afghanistan (was he to be used as shrink in the interrogation of prisoners?) he decided to open fire on soldiers in the process of being deployed there. The salient point is not that he himself did not want to go, but that he opened fire to kill, as if he had to prove his radicalism. My thinking is that he expected to be killed on the spot and thus "get it over with." Now he will undoubtedly become a recruiting tool for the Islamists, a man who rejected the (American) West and gave up everything he gained from being there to embrace the jihad. Never mind if his actions were simply the result of a deeply disturbed mind. Having been brought up in a different manner, having come to reject violence (and thus war), I cannot understand why the giving up loyalty to the US because one identifies with fellow Muslim, required an act of violence. He could have gone back to Jordan and use his skills to help there, he could have joined the Taliban (would they have accepted him or mistrusted him?), he could have become the Albert Schweitzer of the poor in any Muslim country. Adopting his solution is typical of converts as proof of their sincerity. (In my youth, Protestants who became Catholic were often referred to as "holier than the Pope.") The likely pre-disposition of his prosecutors will make it impossible to discover what made him choose his path (e.g. did he really join the jihad?).

In the case of Obama we ought to be better informed about the "thine" to which he should be true; his books do not give evidence of a "hateful me." My censure is perhaps founded on nothing more than a "he ain't the man" I assumed he was by taking him at his word, dismissing at the time his critics who called him an ambitious politician out to prove he could be elected. If he was only that, he played a high risk game with his family, that if they remain loyal will have to maintain the lie, and if not will have a tarnished life to live. Maybe he was only elected because he was so different from "W" though I suspect that not every non-Bush would have made it. I tend to cynicism and had to struggle to overcome it to give "hope a chance." My hope was in particular for him to be a President of peace as well as a leader who would undo the abrogation of individual liberties by the Bush White House. I recognize that there are radical Islamists that need to be prevented from carrying out their threats, but I am inclined to the theory that carrying military action to Islamic countries is not the best way to achieve that goal, primarily because (like Guantanamo) such military action is obviously a too easy recruiting tool. The closing of Gitmo and ending the War in Iraq are great objectives, but the second policy looks even farther from achievement than the first. And now he has embraced the strategy that Petraeus tried in Iraq for Afghanistan, where it may really fail (the alleged gains in Iraq are evaporating). But worse of all, his Administration has adopted the Bush policy of opposing legal challenges to the treatment of "enemy combattants" and is holding on to the powers the Bush people seized under the Patriot Act, no doubt - as some commentator said - because Obama thinks he can use them "wisely." Even if that were true, these powers
should be repealed for Obama may be replaced by a less wise person.

I must admit that he repeated that Iraq was a mistake and the wrong war, that Afghanistan was to right place to go after Al.Q. Thus his policy appears to be what he promised. But events show - and had already shown - that Al. Q. is as much in Pakistan and spreading out, whether in fact or by adaptive offshoots. Combatting them on the ground promises less success than combatting them with their own strategies. After all, we must have learned something from the FBI's occasional successes in their fight with the Mafia. But perhaps not, the killing of CIA agents by a "double agent" (another Jordanian doctor) in Afghanistan is worrisome. To me, Obama's current Afghan policy shows that he has become a prisoner of the military and intelligence complex, has surrendered his much vaunted independent mind for a questionable goal.

Moreover, having decided on his Afghan war policy, he should not have undertaken Healthcare Reform at this time. Undoing the Bush economic legacies is enough of a challenge and whatever approval he received from the right for his own war, hasn't gained him any support for his domestic policies. What surprises me most is that he apparently did not understand that while the people elected him, they also had elected the unmovable members of the House and Senate. To carry a majority of them along he has had to abandon to much of what he stood for. Can he recover and recapture the person he said he is?

The commnent entered by John Byrne (1-20-10, a propos my draft on the Hasan case only) has my support. I do not advocate profiling and simply referred to the finger pointing mentioned in the news at people who should have been alerted, etc. After all, following up on specific info is not the same as the profiling described by Byrne.

[In the spellcheck, FBI's came up and the suggested correction is "fibs."]