Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants a “unified” in quiry into the Army’s in ability to recognize warning signs of the sort broadcast for months by its homicidal Islamist psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.
“This is larger than the Army,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell yesterday. “These are issues that need to be looked at department-wide.”
Well, that shouldn’t take any longer than a year or two — scant comfort to the soldiers and Marines silently going into harm’s way wondering whose side that man with the gun over there is really on.
Silently, because Army Chief of Staff George Casey was lightning-quick to restate the service’s blame-assessment priorities following the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood: “Speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. . . . What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”
Thirteen dead and 42 wounded, and the Army’s top officer is concerned first and foremost about diversity — and you can bet nobody in uniform is going to disagree with him.
To his face.
But surely soldiers believe something else.
For, while most of America was profoundly shocked by the slaughter, when the Fort Hood shooter was finally identified, one thought doubtless flickered through the minds of tens of thousands of career combat soldiers:
Strike Two.
Strike One came back on March 23, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq — when Sgt. Hasan Akbar of the 101st Airborne Division killed two of his officers and wounded 14 others in a grenade and rifle attack on a tent compound in the Kuwaiti desert.
“I may not have killed any Muslims,” he wrote just before the assault, “but being in the Army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill.”
And make a choice he did.
As did Nidal Malik Hasan.
Now, two murderous assaults six years apart may not be that noteworthy in conventional terms. In New York City, two or 10 or more a day was the norm for decades.
But there is nothing conventional about comrades in arms turning their weapons on each other. Such a thing is a pro foundly shocking breach of the ethic that has bound armies together over the centuries — and it is tolerated at grave risk to good order and discipline.
Modern weapons systems — warships, armored vehicles, aircraft — are extraordinarily complex, and they require equally extraordinary levels of trust to be effective.
All those wheels and levers and gauges aboard a submarine or a warplane may bewilder visiting civilians — but a highly trained crewman who is surreptitiously answering to an authority higher than his commanding officer would know exactly how to use them to create death and destruction.
And every American in uniform understands this.
Of course, it would be impossible to eliminate all such risk from uniformed service. But soldiers and sailors don’t ask for guarantees, and they don’t expect them.
They do, however, expect their commanders to take reasonable precautions to protect them from threats like those posed by Sgt. Akbar and Maj. Hasan — and Gen. Casey’s oily response to the Fort Hood shootings simply didn’t meet the standard.
Nobody’s asking Casey to target Muslim service personnel simply because they are Muslim — that would be outrageous, unlawful, and as corrosive of good order and discipline as the murders committed by Akbar and Hasan.
But is it asking too much for the Army to exhibit the same level of tolerance for Islamist crackpots as it does for, say, white supremacists — that is, none whatsoever?
Paint a swastika on an Army barracks and the hounds of hell will be on you in the blink of an eye — and that’s exactly the way it should be.
Yet yesterday it was reported that Maj. Hasan had been seeking to report his psychiatric patients as war criminals, apparently just for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was just the latest in a series of revelations that add up to this: Nidal Malik Hasan is an Islamist nutcase who should never have been near troops. And everybody knew it, yet nobody was willing to do anything about it.
And while Gen. Casey’s plaintive defense of “diversity” may work with the general public, he’s not fooling the folks in the ranks.
They know better, because their lives are on the line.
And they’re waiting for Strike Three. mcmanus@nypost.com