SOWETAN SAYS | Israeli-US vs Iran conflict will hurt other nations

It was Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana who famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The aphorism has evolved over the decades and is now popularly used as: “Those who do not learn (from) history are doomed to repeat it.”

Today, the US is failing to heed Santayana’s warning. The Donald Trump administration may today be celebrating what it has described as successful air strikes on three centres it says are key to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapon development project, but in the long run, the unilateral action may have devastating consequences for global peace, multilateral institutions, as well as the rule of law.

They should have learned from the bitter experiences of their invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the toppling of the Libyan government just over a decade ago.

Some here at home may ask why we should worry ourselves about a war that is so far from our shores. Isn’t the reality of life that the Middle East region regularly explodes into conflict?

But the reality is that the world we live in has long become such a small village that what happens tens of thousands of kilometres away in the Middle East directly affects the lives of people on the southern tip of Africa. At the most basic level, if the Israeli-US versus Iran conflict escalates further, that is most likely to further shoot up the cost of crude oil – leading to huge increases in petrol and diesel prices at the pump, which ultimately raises the general cost of living for all.

At a much deeper level, Trump’s unilateral decision to attack Iran based on yet-unproven claims that Tehran was developing the capacity to manufacture a nuclear bomb fundamentally undermines the post-WW2 international order, which sought to bring about peace through the resolution of disputes via multilateral bodies such as the UN.

In this instance, the US and the Israeli government have simply ignored the UN and gone on to attack a sovereign state because they believed themselves to be stronger militarily.

But the implications of this approach around the world are that other regional powers may, in the future, feel justified to do the same against countries they dislike in their region. This would make for a very unstable and dangerous world where “the silencing of the guns” that African nations often speak of becomes impossible.

Now that the attacks have happened and Iran has retaliated with air strikes of its own in Israel, we can only hope that all sides return to the negotiation table where their differences can be resolved without plunging the entire world into a new and unnecessary conflict.

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