I-Ran So Far

One of the most salient aspects of the Trump administration is how much of its most important policy decisions are made “shooting from the hip” based on ill-thought-out campaign slogans without the slightest understanding of what is happening in the real world. Despite having a coterie of exceptionally experienced and well-educated government functionaries at the Department of State and the major federal security and intelligence, Donald “I really didn’t do that well in school” Trump believes that he knows better, that such expertise needs to be part of the swamp-draining he promised his constituents. Let me be absolutely clear: Donald Trump is the least informed president in modern American history. He even tells us how much he hates to read and how much he distrusts so-called “experts.”

Nothing brings this home like his position on Iran. Make no mistake, Iran is a destabilizing force in the Middle East, not even slightly trustworthy, but pulling out of the UN-sponsored six-party nuclear accord literally hands Tehran a new rallying point to solidify its brutal repressive hand against its own people. As much as Trump believes that Iran is a unified malignant tumor, a blight on the planet, with its government and people aligned in ill-will against the United States, that repressive theocracy is anything but solidly in control; in fact, it is beginning to implode.

Iran’s leadership is rapidly losing its cachet with the people; it is beginning to become a failed state. The dribbles of regional protests have accelerated to most obvious and powerful anti-government assemblages and messages. Iran needs to distract its own people from their social and economic plight, reinstate a “common enemy” to shift blame, and a blustering, tweeting, angry Donald Trump is the easy button, a “bad guy” made to order.

Assuming Trump ignores French President Emanuel Macron’s entreaties to keep that treaty alive – an imperfect accord that at least stays Iran’s nuclear weapons development – and withdraws the United States from that agreement in May, Iran would then be free to resume that weapons program and use Trump’s personality as a rallying point. Tehran can even point to her own protestors as aiding and abetting foreign powers seeking to destroy Iran, justifying further repression in the name of nationalism and Islam. So exactly what is Donald Trump failing to see in the real Iran?

The global warming that decimated farms in Syria and Iraq – loosing over a million of now jobless and homeless farmers (and their families) into angry hopelessness, easy prey for extremists like ISIS and al Qaeda seeking to topple governments and fight for regional, if not global, control – well, that same harsh impact of desertification that crushed livelihoods in Syria and Iraq is now settling in over large swaths of land in Shiite Iran with similarly devastating consequences. Please do not misinterpret the purging of ISIS fighters from Iraq and Syria as a remote extinguishing of Sunni extremists. Whack-a-mole realities continue to prove otherwise. But Iran is simply a mess that could prove its undoing.

The discovery of a body in Iran  might have shed some light on that country’s roiling discontent throughout. The April 26^th Los Angeles Times explains: “The latest threat to Iran’s theocracy — already struggling to contain public anger over unemployment, economic mismanagement, bank failures, social restrictions and environmental damage — seems to have risen from the dead.

“Construction workers renovating a Shiite Muslim shrine near the former tomb of Reza Shah Pahlavi [pictured above] in Tehran this week stumbled upon a mummified corpse, fueling speculation that it could be the missing remains of the king who died in 1944. The tomb was demolished soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution as Iran’s new clerical rulers sought to erase all traces of a secular monarchy that by then was widely seen as corrupt, despotic and dissolute. The body was never found in the ruins, and over the years, the theocracy has quashed any appreciation of the royal period.

“But the passage of four decades, and deepening frustration with the clerics, has revived the reputation of Reza Shah, whom many now regard as an enlightened dictator who used taxes and burgeoning oil revenue to modernize the country.

“‘There is some nostalgia because of the utter failure of the regime in virtually every facet of Iranian life,’ said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. ‘An economy in shambles, an international persona as pariah, double-digit unemployment and inflation, a failing financial system [and] profound oppression against women are good breeding grounds for either despair or nostalgia.’”

Iran’s theocracy is slowly unraveling. They have not delivered a better life for most Iranians… perhaps even lowering the standard of living even further. Their international support of Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis, interference in Lebanon, support for the Syrian Assad regime, meddling in Gaza and general support for militant Islamists around the world is draining the national treasury.

The impact of sanctions still stings, even as the nuclear accord released some of those economic restrictions. But the economic growth promised by Iran’s leaders, even following the elimination of some of those sanctions because of the treaty, just has not materialized. Dissention is growing fast. But a woefully under-informed Donald Trump could just give a failing Iranian government a whole new rallying point to justify the need for citizens to “sacrifice for the good of the state” and to crush any rebellion or protest to the contrary. Not to mention the power of operational nukes presented as a necessary goal to contain Western “aggression.” North Korea, which has aided Iran, is a good example of how the world responds to a nuclear power, and that lesson is not lost on the Ayatollahs. Donald might just become a willing pawn in sustaining and reinforcing Iran’s very unpopular government.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is unfortunately that we have an under-informed president who so willingly can be played like a puppet by world leaders, from Bashir al Assad, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un to now, the Ayatollah Khamenei.