Gwynne Dyer: America's foreign wars may explain homeland slaughter

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?

Perish the thought. Rather than entertain such a subversive idea, official spokespersons and media pundits in the United States have been trying to come up with some other motive for Major Hasan's actions.

Maybe he was a coward who couldn't face the prospect of combat in Afghanistan. Maybe he was a nut-case whose actions had no meaning at all. Or maybe he was unhappy at the alleged abuse he had suffered because he was Muslim/Arab/Palestinian.

After a few days, while the commentariat hesitated before competing narratives, the media are settling on the explanation that it was ethnic/racial/religious abuse that drove Nidal crazy. Bad people doing un-American things were ultimately responsible for the tragedy, and that's the end of it.

The one explanation that is excluded is that America's 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 various Muslim plotters who have been caught in other Western countries before their plans came to fruition, have almost all blamed the Western invasions of Muslim countries for radicalising them.

Never mind, above all, that what really radicalised them was the fact that those invasions made no sense in terms of Western security. No Afghan has ever attacked the United States, 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 liberal amounts of racism. But people find it hard to believe that big, powerful governments like those of the United States, Britain and the other Western powers involved in these foolish adventures could really be so stupid, so the conspiracy theories proliferate.

It is a testimony to the moderation and loyalty of Muslim communities in the West that so few of their members have succumbed to these conspiracy theories.

It is evidence of the profound denial that still reigns in the majority community in the US that the most obvious explanation for Major Hasan's actions didn't even make the media's short list.

I cannot know for sure what moved Major Hasan to do the terrible things he did - each individual is a mystery even to himself. But I do see the US media careening all over the road to avoid the huge and obvious fact that obscures half the horizon. Time to grow up.

* Gwynne Dyer's latest book Climate Wars was published recently in New Zealand by Scribe.