The Architecture of Blame: How Nations Choose Their Enemies

Every time a country gets bombed, the official line is always the same. They say it could be from multiple sources. Nothing is ruled out yet. Everyone is a suspect on paper. That sounds fair, that sounds careful, but watch what actually happens after they say it.

The multiple sources thing never really stays open. It always ends up pointing the same way it was always going to point. For the US it is almost always the Muslims, no matter how many times someone with zero connection to that does the exact same thing. For India it is Pakistan. For Pakistan it is India, plenty of them would say the same thing back. So the list of possible suspects is supposedly endless, but the real list, the one that actually gets chased with urgency, was never endless at all.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

And underneath that there is something even stranger going on. A handful of guys with no real order, no army, no state behind them, get talked about like they could not possibly pull something like this off, like real destruction only belongs to real powers. That is the veil, a nobody cannot do it, so they say, because of how much power the big players supposedly hold. But then the second that same nobody manages to kill some people, just not as many as they could have, just not enough to be called truly catastrophic, suddenly it becomes the biggest thing in the world, deserving of a response way bigger than what was actually done to them.

Now flip it. If a country, another country, does the same thing, or worse, the whole machine slows down. It becomes diplomacy, it becomes calculations, it becomes old history getting dragged back up, we fought them before so now we have to hit back harder to keep it from happening again. That is the justification. Keep the number low next time by making sure this time the number is much higher on the other side. The same logic that is supposed to protect people ends up being the exact thing that could kill way more of them than the original attack ever did.

I am not saying any specific bombing was faked or that a state secretly did what got blamed on some random group. Figuring out who actually did something is genuinely hard, it takes time, real evidence, and jumping to conclusions early has burned people before, wrongly blamed communities, wars started over intelligence that turned out to be wrong. So the caution itself is not the problem.

What sticks with me is the gap. The gap between what they say, multiple sources, anyone could have done it, and who actually gets chased down first every single time. And the even bigger gap in how much force gets used depending on whether the ones being blamed have a state behind them or not. If the same care and the same restraint got applied no matter who was suspected, this would not look anything like it does now.

This might all be wrong too, I know that. No presumptions here. But I know myself, and I know the people around me, and I know when something is being sold to us.

Posted Using INLEO