Posted Tuesday, November 10,  1:03 AM CST,  2:03 AM EST, 0703 GMT.

Top editorial and op-ed commentaries in the Tuesday editions of the leading U. S. newspapers:

1) In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson is convinced that the U.S. Army has let down its troops at Fort Hood. “If [Maj. Nidal] Hasan’s superior officers had investigated, they might have pieced together the story that seems to be emerging: that Hasan was behaving erratically, that his faith apparently had become increasingly political, that he desperately wanted out of the military and that he was distraught about being ordered to the war zone…. How is the Pentagon supposed to tell the difference between reasonable caution and blatant discrimination? There are thousands of Muslims in uniform, serving their country at home and abroad. Ask them.”

2) In the New York Times, David Brooks discerns a “rush to therapy” in media coverage of the massacre at Fort Hood. “This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts…. Worse, [they] absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility.”

3) In the NYT, Bob Herbert counsels President Obama to back down on health-care reform and escalation in Afghanistan, and to focus instead on economic recovery. “We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket…. We need to readjust our focus. We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count.”

4) In his “Global View” feature in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes “In Defense of Hamid Karzai.” “Is Mr. Karzai as bad as his immediate predecessor, Mullah Mohammed Omar, under whose medieval rule Afghanistan became not just a safe haven for al Qaeda, but a byword for Islamist barbarism? … Is Mr. Karzai as bad as the Soviet-backed governments of Mohammad Najibullah and Babrak Karmal, who applied the usual Communist methods of rounding up, torturing and killing tens of thousands of real, suspected or imaginary political opponents? … Our failures in Afghanistan so far have mainly been our own, and they are ours to fix. To blame Mr. Karzai is to point the finger at the wrong culprit in the pursuit of disastrous, dishonorable defeat.”

5) In the WSJ, Lanny Davis, former White House counsel to Bill Clinton, blames the breakdown of an agreement to end the political crisis in Honduras on ousted president Manuel Zelaya. “Mr. Zelaya’s agenda is to reinstall himself to power before the presidential elections. If he succeeds, he might be able to disrupt those elections and create a constitutional crisis by ensuring that no one is credibly elected president. If that occurs, he would likely declare himself president ad infinitum—just what he was trying to do when he was ousted in June…. The U.S. government needs to insist on the implementation of the accord and endorse the results of the Nov. 29 presidential elections as verified by international monitors.”