However, the spotlight will likely remain on the Fort Hood incident for a long time to come.  The fact that US President Barack Obama and the top army brass and civilian leadership attended the memorial service for the victims goes to underscore the solemn seriousness attached to the tragedy.

At a time when the US troops are fighting two long and disastrous wars thousands of miles away in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama couldn’t have stayed away from the memorial service.  And it was only inevitable that the president said what he said at the service.  Talking of the ‘twisted logic’ behind the killings of his fellow men and women in uniform allegedly by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Obama pointed out that “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts.”

In words that might have reminded many in the Muslim world of his predecessor, Obama promised to bring the killer to justice. And the president must have struck a chord with many Americans when he said the fact that the victims died on American soil made it “even more painful and even more incomprehensible.”

But is it really that incomprehensible? While we all share the grief and horror of American people over this tragedy, the incident like the Fort Hood was perhaps waiting to happen. 

Let’s not forget the fact that the US forces are spread very thin – and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the Middle East to Asia, they are spread all over.  While the peaceful American military presence in countries like Japan, Philippines and South Korea has been there since the World War II, it is the worsening conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that are increasingly extracting a huge price from the US troops. 

Growing fatalities in the field and the other physical and emotional trauma that troops routinely go through in a hostile terrain have been increasingly driving the US forces over the edge. 

As an army psychiatrist, Maj. Hasan apparently counselled thousands of those desperate and emotionally traumatised men and women in uniform.  Some of that received horror must have gotten to him. And eventually when it was his own turn to be sent to one of the two fronts, he couldn’t take it any more, especially when he saw those two wars a unjust and unnecessary. 

This is not to justify what he did.  But it is important to understand why he went over the bend if more tragedies like this are to be prevented. This has nothing to do with Maj. Hasan’s religious identity or the fact that his parents were Palestinian immigrants and his extended family still lives in the West Bank.

This tragedy must spark an honest debate in the US about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Meanwhile this isolated incident must not be an excuse for a witch-hunt against US Muslims – both in and outside the army.