Can it really be that anybody seriously believed a career Army psychiatrist would deal with the “stress” of his own deployment to a war he opposes by opening fire and shooting 43 people? Evidently, the answer is yes, as Noah Pollak and others have noted. This is a particular American madness, as far as I can tell, the invocation of ludicrous pop psychology to explain acts that can only properly be described as evil. Recall the case of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who murdered her five children? Before the world could even spend a moment mourning the children, Paula Yates herself was turned into a Rorschach test—of the perils of having too many children, of a traditional marriage, of postpartum depression. The problem is that tens of millions of women go through the same experiences and do not murder their children. Yates represented nothing but, at best, psychosis and, at worst, the face of pure evil.

And so it is with Nadal Hasan. Obviously, there are a great many people in the military who would rather not be deployed to a war zone; for whom such deployments cause stress; and who may indeed be philosophically opposed to the fight they are obliged as a matter of law and duty to wage. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that there are 10,000 such people. Only one has actually taken a machine gun and mowed down his fellow soldiers. The argument that Nadal Hasan was somehow sent round the bend by his orders is not only bizarre but also deeply and profoundly insulting to those in the military who live with all the same pressures and do good rather than evil.

The “stress did it” claim has nothing to do with Hasan anyway; it’s a cover for implicit attacks on the McChrystal strategy for deploying significant additional troops to Afghanistan. That’s the true purpose of the pop-psych analysis anyway; it’s a way of removing the singular meaning from an event and converting into something more all-purpose.

This is, perhaps, an argument that could be advanced against those who are seeing a broader issue at work relating to Hasan’s religious-ideological leanings and whether his conduct has something to do with Islamic terrorism. But that argument has nothing to do with examining Hasan’s psychic makeup, which is something no one should do without a license, but rather the ideas and convictions that he has publicly expressed. It’s hard to separate out rumor from fact, but if three-quarters of the stories we’ve been reading are true, then it’s clear Hasan was an Islamist ideologue of some sort and that the Army may have failed to police its ranks properly out of a fear of appearing anti-Muslim. Those aren’t impressionistic conclusions; they will either be proved true or false. And if true, something that could have been prevented wasn’t.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 10:42 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.