It's not a "defeat" defeat

Mark Steyn on the extended spectacle of the prosecution of the Fort Hood shooter:

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban.  Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.”  The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse.  After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse:  “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”  And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on. 

* * * 

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media.  Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot.  The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged.  Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.