“Companies are begging us to buy products, but we don’t place orders or stock goods because people are not buying…Basics like rice and chicken are just not staple foods anymore.”
An Iranian shopkeeper who refused to give his name.
As a boy, when traveling to my stepfather’s diplomatic post in Beirut, Lebanon (US Embassy), we stopped off in Tehran, Iran. Then still under the oppressive boot of the secular Pahlavi monarchy (which gained power with direct US involvement), I admired a meticulously clean city, modern yet with a most magnificent Middle Eastern look. I called it a “super-clean Beirut.” Iran had close ties to Israel in those days, and the US made sure that Tehran was stocked with state-of-the-art weapons and aircraft. Then, in 1979, a super-conservative Shiite cleric (Iran is over 90% Islamic Shiite) left his refuge in Paris, France to lead a revolution that deposed the Pahlavi regime and instituted a brutal theocracy in its place. The US embassy became the site of a 444-day siege of American hostages. Our failed efforts to extract our people helped toppled the Jimmy Carter presidency.
We are approaching half a century of rule-by-ayatollahs. Iran still treasures higher education. There are still ski resorts for those few who can still afford that luxury. But Iran has refined enough fissionable material at this point, experts believe, to create several strategic nuclear weapons. For almost the entirety of the theocracy’s tenure, relations between Iran the United States (and what Tehran calls America’s puppet Israeli regime) have been horrible. Maybe worse.
For over four decades, the United States has imposed powerful economic sanctions against Iran, making its export of oil from its massive reserves difficult at best and limiting all manner of exports to Iran, including consumer goods and even food, to Iran. The animosity against the United States has accelerated, even as massive numbers of Iranians, particularly from their small Jewish population, emigrated to the United States, creating one of the most successful diasporas in American history. But four-plus decades of US-led Western sanctions against Tehran, under a mistaken belief that we could force a quick regime change, have mostly punished the people… and not the religious leadership that believes God is on their side… and that the people must therefore accept their hardship in the name of Allah.
As Iran began to mount a nuclear program, ostensibly to generate electricity, the United States sensed a need to curtail that effort, at least as it was also targeting the creation of fissionable nuclear weapons. The Council on Foreign Relations summarizes an international accord that, according to our own Department of Defense, stopped the military aspect of Iran’s nuclear efforts: “Signed in 2015 by Iran and several world powers, including the United States, the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
“President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, claiming it failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influence. Iran began ignoring limitations on its nuclear program a year later.” The accord had obviously crumbled, and the theocracy rapidly restored their nuclear weapons program. US sanctions escalated. When Trump was replaced by Joe Biden, there were clear indications that Iran was willing to trade a lifting of sanctions for accepting an imposition of severe restrictions on its nuclear program. All that positive news was stopped dead in its tracks after the death of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September while in custody of the Iranian morality police; her crime: improperly wearing a required head shawl (hijab).
All hell broke loose as hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in protest. US sanctions increased. Protestors where shot and killed, and many were arrested. The Iranian criminal justice system began trying and executing several participants. A “tsunami of unrest has surged across Iran, with protests persisting despite a brutal crackdown by authorities and the threat of execution for demonstrators. Though women’s rights were the spark, the government now faces broader grievances, especially long-simmering resentments over the tanking economy and the evisceration of people’s finances.
“Experts said the bleak economic situation has left Iranians all but tapped out after a decade of such challenges. But they doubted that growing discontent will translate into enough popular anger to seize power or even weaken the government’s ability to suppress dissent.” Los Angeles Times, February 12th. While the Amini-driven protests have subsided, the hatred for the religious regime has intensified. Strangely, the US sympathy for the protestors manifest itself in harsher sanctions against that same regime… which in turn made life even more miserable for the Iranian people. And while that regime continues to have rural support, educated urban Iranians are facing price increases for basic foods… to a level where they can no longer afford to eat.
If relations with the West were horrible, Iran’s decision to supply drones and missiles to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine made our sitting down to discuss a nuclear accord a virtual impossibility. Meanwhile, “Though the protests have not died down, they have waned in scale and scope — for the simple reason ‘that the population cannot afford them,’ said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group think tank. ‘The focus of the population has moved to making ends meet.’
“Already-dire economic indicators have worsened even more in recent weeks. On the black market, the Iranian rial has stumbled to 443,500 to the dollar, a slight improvement from the all-time-low of 450,000 a few weeks ago but nowhere near the 300,000 mark before the protests began in September… Inflation has surpassed 50%, the highest rate in decades. Food prices have risen by more than 70% . More than half of the young are unemployed. In early December, local commerce apps such as Sheypoor and Divar saw people trying to barter kitchen utensils, tools, toys and clothes for food.
“‘When I go shopping I have to be very selective,’ said Negar, a 29-year-old homemaker who works part time in a nursery and who declined to give her last name. ‘Forget about steaks. I don’t buy olive oil anymore. Iranian rice is much more expensive.’… She and her husband could never hope to own the apartment where they live, which they can afford to rent only because her father-in-law pitches in. Before, she loved to entertain there, regularly hosting lunch and dinner gatherings for friends… ‘Now there’s no way,’ she said. ‘You have to give up your entire salary for a month.’” LA Times.
Iran remains a cultured, educated society with a religiously-justified paramilitary and military infrastructure that has embraced torture, murder and severe incarceration as well as the willingness to let her own people suffer in their daily lives to support religious fundamentalism. Is there a lesson for Americans in letting religious fundamentalists impose their values on the rest of us? Is there a hypocrisy in imposing sanctions on a nation’s leadership where only the people suffer… and nothing changes for decades?
I’m Peter Dekom, and as cruelty and egotistical leaders the world over tighten their grip on their subjects, democracy is threatened to its core… and the increased civilian violence and military conflict has risen to the highest global threat levels ever experienced.
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