Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana. The line has since been folk-tongued to sound like a proverb—“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.”
Like axioms in maths, proverbs don’t need proof. But Bibi Netanyahu is hell-bent on proving it. Don Trump, the joker in every pack of global crisis, is cheering him from the sidelines. Wait and watch! They’ll repeat history either as a Persian tragedy or a Farsi farce.
One can forgive Don. He is ruling a country with 250 years of history—too short to learn from mistakes of the past. Worse, a car-maker once told them that history is bunk. They revere him like a Confucius or a Chanakya.
But Bibi? He is ruling a people who have memories spanning two millennia and more. Yet he is letting himself repeat a mistake he had witnessed in his neighbourhood, just two decades ago.
IMAGE AI
What is Bibi up to? By his own admission, he is seeking a ‘regime change’ in Iran, a land ruled by ayatollahs for half a century since its people kicked out a ‘progressive’ tyrant who claimed to have descended from the Sasanians and Achaemenids of ancient Persia. In reality, he was but the son of a plebeian soldier who had executed a coup in 1925 and called himself Shah.
The Shia ayatollahs undid all the good and bad things the Shah had done, installed fundamentalist regimes, called America the Great Satan, issued fatwas on writers, made girls wear burqa, and sent spies to moral-police the people. But unlike the Taliban and other Sunni fundamentalists, they let girls go to school, held elections, invested in science, and let ancient Persia progress into a modern state.
Let’s get back to Bibi and his plot for a Persian regime change, a phrase many in the west have come to abhor after their flop show in Baghdad. More ominously, the excuse given by Bibi is the same as what was given by George Bush when he went into Iraq—that Iraq had made weapons of mass destruction, a euphemism for atomic, chemical and biological bombs.
Their search ended like chasing a mirage in the Mesopotamian sands. They found baby food packets in place where they thought were war chemicals, path samples in place of war germs, and power-generation rigs where they thought atom bombs were being made. Frustrated, they hanged the Mesopotamian lord, and left Iraq, one of Islamic West Asia’s two most technologised and industrialised lands, in a worse ‘messpot’ than they had found it.
Now Bibi and Don are targeting the one left. The reason? The same! That Iran is close to making atom bombs. Thank God, no poison gas or germ bombs this time.
To be fair, this time it looks truer. By most accounts, Iran is close to making bombs, if not already made. But then who made them make the bombs? They resumed bomb-making after Don Trump cheated on a deal that Barack Obama had made with them in 2015. Iran had vowed to destroy their stacks of enriched uranium, scrap two-thirds of their gas centrifuges, build no heavy-water facility, let IAEA inspectors roam around their atom labs, and so on. In return, Obama promised them relief, grants, technology, and the west’s hand of friendship.
Enter Trump in the White House, and he scrapped the deal. Iran had stuck to its its word—IAEA boss said so in March 2018—but Don and Bibi said Iran was hiding their bomb tools. To cut a long bomb story short, Trump went back on the atom deal; the ayatollahs back to their atom labs.
Now, what has been the big idea? Clean out the bad bombs, or cripple West Asia’s two most tech-savvy nations?
prasannan@theweek.in