The Fort Hood tragedy has provoked a range of explanations. Photo / AP

The Fort Hood tragedy has provoked a range of explanations. Photo / AP

This year, the Pentagon committed US$50 million ($67 million) to a study investigating why the suicide rate in the military is rising. It used to be below the suicide rate in comparable civilian groups, but now it's four times higher.

Thirteen American soldiers were killed by a gunman at Fort Hood in Texas last week, but 75 others have died by their own hand at the same army base since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why?

To most people, the answer is obvious. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been frustrating, exhausting and seemingly endless, and some people just can't take it any more. But the Pentagon is spending that money to search for other possible causes, because it doesn't like that answer.

The US military budget tops half a trillion dollars, so the military can splash out on diversionary studies that draw attention away from the main problems, which are combat fatigue and loss of faith in the mission.

And we are seeing exactly the same pattern in the response to the killings in Fort Hood, although in this case the military are also getting the free services of the US media.

Let's see, now. A devout Muslim officer serving in the US Army, born in the United States but of Palestinian ancestry, is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in the near future. He opens fire on his fellow soldiers, shouting: "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is great"). What can his motive have been?

Hard to guess, isn't it? Was he unhappy about his promotion prospects?

There is something comic in the contortions that the US media engage in to avoid the obvious fact that if the United States invades Muslim countries, some Muslim Americans are bound to think that America has declared war on Islam. It has not, but from Pakistan to Somalia the US is killing Muslims in the name of a "war on terror".

Some of them are enemies of the US government, and some of them are innocent civilians. Some of them are even "friendly-fire casualties", like the Afghan soldiers killed recently in a US air strike.

But every single day since 2003, US soldiers have killed Muslims, and every day those deaths have been reported in the media.

So is it possible that the shooter in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who was waiting to ship out to Afghanistan, did not want to take a personal part in that enterprise? Might he belong to that large majority of Muslims (though probably a minority among American Muslims) who, unable to discover any rational basis for US strategy since 9/11, have drifted towards the conclusion that the United States is indeed waging a war on Islam?