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After a US strike damaged an Iranian water reservoir, a simple Persian inscription about water and life became, one the one hand, a powerful indictment of US moral depravity in its conduct of war and, on the other, a revelation of another society’s ethical vision.
By JAVED AKBAR
On June 10, 2026, reports emerged that US military strikes in Iran’s Hormozgan Province damaged a water reservoir serving the coastal village of Kuhestak, near the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting access to water for more than 20 000 residents.
Amid images of shattered concrete and twisted steel, one detail stood out.
Inscribed on the reservoir wall were the Persian words:
آب نبض زندگی است
با اسراف، آهنگی آن را کند نسازیم
‘Water is the pulse of life; let us not diminish its rhythm through wastefulness.’
Few public messages capture the moral imagination of civilisation so succinctly. In a single breath, it affirms reverence for life, restraint in consumption, stewardship of nature, and responsibility towards generations yet unborn. It speaks not of conquest or dominance, but of balance and care.
If these are the values a society chooses to engrave upon its public infrastructure, they reveal something essential about its ethical vision.
And therein lies the tragedy.
A water reservoir serves no ideology. It serves life – children, mothers, workers, the elderly, the vulnerable. When such infrastructure becomes entangled in war, the victims are never abstractions. They are ordinary people whose survival depends upon the most elemental necessity of existence.
The contrast is difficult to ignore. Nations that present themselves as custodians of human rights and the international order have repeatedly been implicated in actions that inflict profound suffering upon civilian populations far removed from the corridors of power where such decisions are made.
This contradiction is not incidental. It is historical.
From Vietnam to Iraq, from Afghanistan to Somalia and Libya, US military interventions have left behind scars that continue to trouble the conscience of the world.
In Vietnam, the My Lai massacre exposed the catastrophic consequences of dehumanisation, where hundreds of unarmed civilians – including women and children – were slaughtered.
In Iraq, Abu Ghraib became a symbol of humiliation and moral collapse, while the killings at Haditha and Nisour Square deepened the perception that civilian life could be treated as expendable in the calculus of war.
In Afghanistan, a prolonged conflict marked by drone strikes and night raids claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives, including wedding parties and funerals. Independent estimates vary widely, but all confirm a devastating human toll that extends across generations. Pakistan, too, bore heavy consequences, with tens of thousands killed in the wider fallout of the ‘war on terror’.
‘I will never apologise for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.’ George H W Bush
The downing of Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988 – killing all 290 civilians on board, including 66 children – remains one of the darkest episodes in US-Iran relations. In the aftermath, then vice-president George H W Bush defiantly declared: ‘I will never apologise for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.’ For many around the world, those words came to symbolise not strength, but unsettling indifference to the suffering of others. The refusal to acknowledge accountability at the time left a lasting imprint on global perception, reinforcing the sense that power and impunity often travel together.
On February 28, 2026, the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School in Minab, Iran, was struck multiple times by missiles allegedly fired by the US and Israel, killing 156 people, including 120 students aged seven to 12 years. It was widely condemned. Investigations by The New York Times, NPR and CBC News indicated that the United States was likely responsible for the attack.
More recent strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran have only intensified an old and unresolved question: when the victims are geopolitically marginal, why does moral language so often grow faint, conditional, or absent altogether?
These are not isolated aberrations. They point to a deeper pattern – the recurring assumption that overwhelming power can suspend moral restraint.
At the heart of this pattern lies a quiet hierarchy of human worth: some lives are named, mourned, and universally recognised; others are reduced to numbers, classified as collateral, or absorbed into strategic necessity.
Such thinking corrodes the very principles it claims to uphold.
For the true measure of civilisation is not the scale of its arsenals, nor the reach of its alliances, but the weight it assigns to a single human life – especially when that life lies beyond its borders and outside its interests.
The Persian inscription on that reservoir wall stands as a restrained yet piercing moral reminder. It rebukes the arrogance of force not with anger, but with clarity.
It tells us that greatness is not the ability to destroy, but the discipline to preserve; not domination, but stewardship; not coercion, but compassion.
Military power can shatter infrastructure and silence cities. It cannot erase the ethical truths that outlive empires.
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Long after the dust settles and the headlines fade, those words remain – quiet, unyielding, and unresolved – posing a question that every great power must eventually face:
Will history remember your strength, or your moral depravity?
For power without conscience does not command respect; it stands condemned by history and humanity alike, an indictment that time will not erase.
Javed Akbar is a freelance writer whose opinion columns have appeared in the Toronto Star and various digital platforms.
