The agricultural sector in Iran is in free fall because of the two decades of ever-worsening drought. The government prints money, and the inflation rate, unsurprisingly, has gone from 10% to 35% in a year. Meanwhile, though the Trump Administration said it would exempt eight countries, including Japan, South Korea, and India, from sanctions (with China and Turkey sure to keep buying oil whatever Washington says), so that they could continue to buy Iranian oil, Iran’s oil exports have plummeted by more than 50%, from 2.7 million barrels a day in June 2018 to 1.15 million barrels at the end of 2018. That’s an unprecedented decrease in Iran’s income.
The economic degringolade in the Islamic Republic has had many effects. There is capital flight — $59 billion was sent abroad in 2016 and 2017, by people seeking to invest outside Iran. It’s a vote of no-confidence in the Iranian economy. Many thousands of Iranians have also left for the West. For example, when Serbia permitted visa-free travel for just three months (from August to October 2017), 40,000 Iranians arrived. Of those 40,000, 28,000 were ultimately unable to find permanent refuge, and returned unhappily to Iran, but 12,000 did manage to remain in the West, with most of them going to the U.K.
Most telling of all is the prediction of the regime’s likely downfall, made not in Washington or Riyadh or Jerusalem, but in Iran itself, by two people closely linked to the regime. One is Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian regime, who has said that he expects the Iranian regime to collapse unless it reforms.
“The foundation of any society is to win people’s satisfaction. There is no guarantee that we stay in power and the others go,” local media quoted Hassan as saying.
“The continued collapse of society and the spread of hatred and hypocrisy lead to forcing people to have two personalities,” he said.
“If we lose our principles, and become preoccupied with formalities instead of fundamentals, it is an alarm bell that signals danger to this society.”
And Faezeh Rafsanjani, daughter of the late Iranian leader Hashemi Rafsanjani, has in similar terms declared that “the regime has morally collapsed and the Iranian regime’s body would follow if an alternative to the current regime became available to the people.”
Khomeini and Rafsanjani were addressing the moral failures of the regime, but as with the Soviet Union, those moral failures include economic crimes. The hatred of which Hassan Khomeini speaks is that felt by growing numbers of Iranians disgusted at the “hypocrisy” of the regime’s leaders, who are engaged in their own vast enrichment while one-fifth of the country sinks into poverty and the middle class falls apart.
When the country was prospering, it was easier for people to overlook the unjust enrichment of their greedy rulers, but at a time of collapse in the two main sectors of the economy, oil and agriculture, there is now a keen awareness of how the Iranian system is rigged, to keep the leaders and their extended families — nepotism is rampant — very prosperous, while the rest of the country suffers.
For forty years, the Iranian people have had to endure rule by the fanatics of the Islamic Republic. Those fanatics have executed homosexuals, fanned antisemitism, forced women to wear the hijab, promoted the wearing of the chador, jailed and tortured and even murdered dissidents, and led those mindless chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” “There is no fun in Islam,” the Ayatollah Khomeini famously claimed, and Iran’s clerics have spent their time trying to ensure just that.
The clerical rulers have mismanaged the economy at every level. Five million Iranians, including its most experienced technocrats — secular, Western-educated — fled Iran after the revolution. Those in Iran today who have advanced training in economics and management have often found themselves undercut by clerics who, without such training, nonetheless try to run the economy on the basis of vague “Islamic principles.”
The rulers of Iran have squandered billions of dollars on foreign adventurism in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and “Palestine,” with no discernible benefit to the Iranian people.
The regime has not the slightest idea how to deal with the drought. But when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 9, 2018 publicly offered to help the Iranian people, by sharing Israeli expertise in drip irrigation and, especially, in the recycling of waste water (Israel recycles 90% of its waste water, far more than any other country), the mullahs angrily rejected the offer.
The clerics and the officers who run the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) have created a culture of corruption that belies their claims of Islamic morality. Ayatollah Khamenei himself controls a business empire worth $95 billion, far more than the Shah of Iran ever possessed. The late President Rafsanjani had amassed a fortune of $1 billion. Other high-ranking clerics and IRGC officers have become millionaires.
How much longer can the regime survive?
Buraq says
A bankrupt country due to a bankrupt belief system – Islam! Clowns!
mortimer says
Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini has admitted that people don’t believe in the mullahocracy. They live double lives. This means that there is hypocrisy at the top. Even the top mullahs don’t believe in what they are doing. They are enriching themselves without accountability.
Everyone sees that, so a revolution is brewing. The US has a responsibility to signal its support for a better alternative to the mullahocracy.
The best solution is a return to the monarchy which will provide a focus of loyalty and unity. Monarchies are among the most stable and prosperous countries.
CRUSADER says
A degringolade is simply a rapid deterioration, a sudden decline in condition, or a sudden downfall.
Here’s to baptisms of fire !
+++++++++++++++++++++
Hugh Fitzgerald says
It’s one of my favorite words from the French, given a warm welcome in English, where it answers a felt need. I remember that it was a favorite word, too, of that polymath Jacques Barzun, which is good enough for me.
gravenimage says
Fine use of the term here, Hugh.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
“Ayatollah Khamenei [Khomeini?] himself controls a business empire worth $95 billion, far more than the Shah of Iran ever possessed.”
How can a dead man control a business empire? I await his forthcoming book, “Secrets of Posthumous Wealth Management”.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I think that [Khomeini] was inserted by the editing program, which has a mind of its own, questioning whether the writer really meant “Khamenei” or instead wanted “Khomeni,’ Not receiving an answer, the program left in the query. Sorry. I find that some of these programs have minds of their own, and will substitute words, including proper nouns, that they “know” I must have meant. But I didn’t.
Incidentally, the first long words my son uttered, when he was about 2, were “Ayatollah Khomeini.” Both true, and dismaying.
gravenimage says
These Ayatollahs just have similar names.
Walter Sieruk says
Khamenei even had a meeting with the chief terrorist chief of Islamic Jihad and their talking about the Muslim daydream and fantasy of destroy Israel actually means nothing Iran’s stooge jihad groups with the jihadists who are the members of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish , Islamic terror entities as Islamic jihad ,Hezbollah ,Hamas , and so forth with their Muslim jihad agenda of destroying the Jewish State of Israel and replacing her with an Islamic “state, are dangerous deluded violent wicked and irrational .
So much so that they are similar to the characters in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 9:3. This reads “The hearts of men are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterwards they join the dead.”
Likewise, the jihadists of those scheming and murderous Islamic terror organizations, just mentioned, are, in many ways , the same as those anti-Israel violent men described in Psalm 83:2-4 . Which reads “See how your enemies growl, how your foes rear their heads. With cunning, they conspire against your people: they plot against those you cherish. ‘come’ they say , ‘let us destroy them as a nation ,so that Israel’s name is remembered no more…’ Further in this very same chapter in verses 16 -18 it is also written. “Cover their faces with shame, Lord so that they will seek your name. May they ever be ashamed and dismayed; may they perish in disgrace. Let them know that you, whose name is the Lord – that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” [N.I.V.]
Walter Sieruk says
This above article informs the readers that those in power in this current Islamic regime of Iran “have executed homosexuals.” Additional information about this has exposed in a book by a former Muslim .Which reveals that “Estimates by human rights activists and opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran of the number of gay men and lesbian s executed for crimes related to their sexual orientation since 1979 vary between several hundred to as many as six thousand. According to the Boroumand Foundation, records exist for at least 107 executions with charges related to homosexuality between 1979 and 1990 . Iran is one of the eight countries in the world when homosexual acts are punishable by death; all are Islamic. According to a 2013 report from the IHRDC:” [1]
[1] THE ISLAM IN ISLAMIC TERRORISM by Ibn Warraq, page 340.
gravenimage says
Yes–horrible.
Walter Sieruk says
Those poor brainwashed Muslims who are thoroughly mind programmed by the mullahs and imams to the extent that they can’t even think for themselves .Furthermore, those .Islamic terror entities and Hamas Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad have with their jihadist scheming along with the PA and Abbas with their intention of destroying the State of Israel and replacing her with some kind of Islamic “state” is an Islamic agenda that is fated to fail in the end. For all of such Muslim schemes and effort will come nothing in the end. The reason is that all their plots and striving against the State of Israel are all lose in the end .This is because Abbas is greatly overruled by the God of the Bible. Who is the Supreme and Ultimate supporter of Israel. As reflected in the following verses of the Bible. “A man’s heart may be full of schemes, but the Lord‘s purpose will prevail.” Proverbs 19:21. [N.E.B.] Also, Psalm 135:4. This informs the reader that “The Lord has chosen Jacob to be His own and Israel His special treasure.”