Iran’s oil exports have declined by more than half just in the last six months of 2018. If Washington, next April, refuses to extend the exemptions currently granted to eight buyers of Iranian oil, how low can those exports go? The Trump administration has said that it aims to reduce those exports to zero.
Because of the drought, Iranian agriculture is a disaster. The most important agricultural crop in Iran, by far, is pistachios, before the drought bringing in more than $5 billion annually. The province of Kerman produces 70% of Iran’s pistachios. Officials at the Agriculture-Jahad Ministry in the North of Kerman say that the production of pistachio has fallen by 80% in 2018. In the city of Rafsanjan, which is the pistachio capital of Iran, production fell in 2018 by 90%. And not only has production fallen by 80%-90% as compared with 2017, but the pistachios that are now produced are of poor quality due to drought and heat, and consequently fetch far less on the market than did crops in previous years. Furthermore, the pistachio trees have been so damaged by the heat and drought that they are expected to produce far less in 2019 than in 2018, which was for Iran’s pistachio growers the worst year on record.
Iran gives an impression of strength because of its foreign aggression. Those Revolutionary Guards in Iraq and Syria, those 140,000 missiles supplied to Hezbollah in Lebanon, those weapons transferred to the Houthis in Yemen, are cause for alarm. But they are not signs of economic strength. The very adventurism that makes Iran appear powerful has increased its economic weakness in several ways. First, had Iran ceased its aggressive behavior abroad, the Americans would not have felt compelled to reimpose sanctions on its oil sales. Second, that aggressiveness has cost the Iranians more than 18 billion dollars, in money and weapons used on behalf of, or transferred to, allies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and “Palestine.” That is money Iran needs at home. Third, had the Iranian rulers thought more of their own country’s interests and less about being the champions of the Jihad against Israel, they could have benefited from Israel’s offer to help Iran in the management of its water resources.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has suffered a moral collapse, as both Khomeini’s grandson and Rafsanjani’s daughter have charged. People are fed up with the morality police constricting their daily lives. Iranians are tired, too, of the corruption and hypocrisy of the regime — rife with nepotism, privatization of government assets, and insider deals — that are on maddening display. Having had their fill of the clerics, Iranians are as a result even leaving Islam. Some have abandoned religion altogether, while others have made Christianity the “fastest growing religion” in Iran.
Iran has also suffered an economic collapse, the result of expensive foreign follies, financial mismanagement, misallocation of resources, geopolitical miscalculation (Washington’s sanctions have exacted a steep price), and the historic drought.
What has not yet arrived is the political collapse of the regime. But this is the Muslim Middle East, and anything could set it off. A rise in the price of bread and other staples. A higher tax on gasoline. An Instagram of the morality police in Tehran, shows them grabbing a girl for not wearing her hijab, while she yells at them, and even delivers a swift kick to her persecutors — an Instagram that goes viral. Or a different Instagram, this one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s luxurious villa, inside and out, never before seen by the public, that every second Iranian has now seen.
Whatever the outrage that prompts them, thousands of protesters show up in Revolution Square in Tehran, to denounce the morality police, Ayatollah Khamenei and his villa, the Revolutionary Guards, the clerical lords of misrule. The police manage to finally disperse the crowd by firing tear gas and beating into bloody submission the front ranks of protesters. But the next day, ten times as many protesters show up in the same square, and not only there, but in another dozen Iranian cities. The Instagrams of these protests go viral. The police are not able to hold the crowds back. The army is called in, and the soldiers do not hesitate to use live fire, killing more than 2,000 people around the country. When the news of these killings spreads across the social media, all hell breaks loose. Now there are more protests, in 80 cities across Iran. Soldiers who are told by their officers to fire on the protesters, in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Karaj, Shiraz, Tabriz, as they had done previously, now refuse to obey. Some soldiers join the protesters instead. Instagrams of soldiers marching with the protesters spread everywhere. The crowds keep getting larger, throughout the country, and now they start to attack the local headquarters of the religious police. Not even Qom is quiet. “The army is with us!” is the message on social media. Throughout the country, the quarters of the Revolutionary Guards are surrounded by units of the army. In a few places, the IRGC try to fight their way out, but the soldiers fire on them, killing many. The Guards realize that resistance is futile and, as the army demands, they surrender their weapons.
After several weeks of protest marches around the country, the regime is toppling. Orders from the top are being ignored. There is one final, gigantic march in Tehran. More than one million Iranians, with Hassan Khomeini among them, are marching toward the government offices. The army, where is the army, to halt the marchers, to save the regime? But the soldiers do not appear, the generals having countermanded the orders given them by the clerics to “crush the protesters.” Or rather, many soldiers do appear, and so do some high-ranking officers — look, there is General Tabatabai! — not to halt, but to join the protesters. Now the marchers are closing in on the offices of the Supreme Leader, where white-turbaned clerics are seen attempting to flee, and now they’ve entered the building, but Ayatollah Khamenei himself is nowhere to be found, and the marchers are now joking about “the Hidden Imam” and….
Well, that’s a possible scenario for the regime’s downfall. Maybe not this year. Or the next. And maybe not as in my fantasy above. But one way or another, it soon will happen.