Mark Steyn:

Thirteen dead and 28 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “war on terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy – a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.

And he’s a U.S. Army major.

And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.

When it emerged early Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Maj. Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name.”

Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense that the New York Times’ first report on Maj. Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’”