Earlier this year, the Pentagon committed $50m to a study on why the suicide rate in the military is rising: it used to be below the rate in comparable civilian groups, but now is four times higher. Thirteen American soldiers were killed by a gunman at Fort Hood, Texas, last Thursday, but 75 have died by their own hand at the same base since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why?

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 - combat fatigue and loss of faith in the mission. We are seeing the same pattern in the response to the Fort Hood killings, although in this case the army is getting the services of the media for free.

Let's see. A devout Muslim officer of the US Army, born in the US but of Palestinian ancestry, is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan. He opens fire on his fellow soldiers, shouting "Allahu Akbar". Was he unhappy about his promotion prospects?

There is something comic in the contortions the media engage in to avoid the fact that if the US invades Muslim countries, some Muslim Americans will think that it 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."

So is it possible that the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, did not want to take part in that enterprise in Afghanistan? 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 US is indeed waging a war on Islam?

Rather than entertain such subversive idea, US spokespersons and media have been trying to come up with some other motive for Maj Hasan's actions. Maybe he was a coward who couldn't face the prospect of combat in Afghanistan, or a nut-case whose actions had no meaning or unhappy at the alleged abuse he had suffered because he was Muslim/Arab/Palestinian.

The one explanation excluded is that the US wars in Muslim lands overseas are radicalising Muslims at home. Never mind that the home-grown Muslim terrorists who attacked the London transport system in 2005, and the plotters caught in other Western countries before their plans came to fruition, have almost all blamed the Western invasions of Muslim countries for radicalising them.

What radicalised them was the fact that those invasions made no sense in terms of Western security. No Afghan has attacked the US, although Arabs living in Afghanistan were involved in the planning of 9/11. There were no terrorists in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction, and no contacts between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. So why did the US invade those countries?

The real reasons are panic and ignorance, reinforced by militaristic reflexes and laced with racism. But people find it hard to believe that the US, Britain and other Western governments involved in these foolish adventures could be so stupid, so the conspiracy theories proliferate.

It is a testimony to the loyalty of Muslims in the West that so few of their members have succumbed to these conspiracy theories. It is evidence of the denial that reigns in the majority community in the US that the obvious explanation for Major Nidal's actions didn't even make the media's short list.