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It wasn’t obvious from his demeanor in the press conference at Fort Hood last night, but November 5, 2009, was probably the worst day of Lieut. General Robert Cone’s life. A commander takes every death personally, but senseless deaths of this kind hit especially hard. Administrative duties are the way ahead on this tragedy: tend to the wounded and families, honor the dead, clean up, investigate, assess. Cone will be glad of such preoccupations in the days to come.

Jennifer asks, rightly, how all the red flags concerning Major Nidal Hasan could have been overlooked. The answer, I believe, is larger than any series of Army decision points about the supervision or employment of Hasan. It’s even larger than pervasive political correctness. The “failure” in this case is something we actually consider, 99 percent of the time, to be a success: the peaceable, even complacent large-mindedness of the American character.

American soldiers today don’t need anyone to train them out of reflexive suspicion about their fellows. They don’t harbor it to begin with. We who have been in the armed forces have often served with Muslims, including very observant ones, and our experience with them is almost uniformly positive. More than most of American society, the U.S. military is in contact with Muslims on a routine basis. Soldiers are especially likely to have a mental image of Muslims as people -- congenial or not, according to personality -- rather than as a political class.

Even beyond this factor, however, is a general complacency about the security of our American civil life. We come under attack very rarely. As the Fort Hood event is analyzed, pundits will emphasize this point and conclude that Americans need to wise up, get suspicious, shift from placidity to vigilance. That line of thought is not invalid: we should act more readily on suspicions of the kind raised by Hasan’s prior behavior.

But life will not be better for us when we do. It will take a step backward from the marvelous, quiescent openness that makes the American life so uniquely worth fighting and dying for. Nor can every political ideology that aspires to govern us be trusted with administering a form of reflexive suspicion about the citizens in our midst. That was made obvious by the Homeland Security Department’s notorious warnings about domestic terrorism in April. We need to be very careful about institutionalizing such civic mistrust.

It’s a heavy and sorrowful duty, like the ones General Cone has to undertake now, to consider the need for and ramifications of earlier intervention in a life like Nidal Hasan’s. It has to be done, but losing our very American reluctance in this regard is not something to wish for. Historically, humans have not proved very adept at walking the fine line between legitimate, situational suspicion and its politicized evil twin.

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