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?