On Iran

Iran is another place that will disappoint the smash and burn crowd.
News reports out of Iran indicate that the economy is in shambles, with unemployment and inflation the major worries. Think of it. The economy of one of the world’s major oil producers is in shambles. Will the failures of the country's economy force the mullahs to rein in their out of control president?

Ahmadinejad challenged for control of Iran's economy


The best way to deal with Iran may be constant, unrelenting economic pressure. The question is whether the west has staying power, and whether Russia and China see a defanged Iran to be in their interest.

Western culture took deep root during the time of the Shah and even though it hasn’t been obvious in the climate of cultural revolution, it still exists. (The Communist Chinese regime underwent tremendous cultural repression under Mao Tse Tung and now western influences are found in all major Chinese cities. Things do change!)

Recently, women were arrested for demonstrating for their rights,
Iranian Women Are Arrested After Protests Outside Court

What is important to realize is that after the Iranian revolution, such a demonstration would have been impossible.

Further, please take a look at an important report from Lara Secor of the New York Times in the January 28, 2007 magazine section entitled "Whose Iran" (It's quite long and a fee access item, so take the 14 day free trial to log in and read the piece in its entirety). But let me quote from its concluding paragraphs:

Iran is not a poor country. It is highly urbanized and modern, with a sizable middle class. Oil revenues, which Iran has in abundance, should be channeling plenty of hard currency into the state's coffers, and in fact the economy's overall rate of growth is healthy and rising. But as Parvin Alizadeh, an economist at London Metropolitan University, explained to me, what ultimately matters is how the state spends its influx of wealth. The Iranian government has tried to create jobs swiftly and pacify the people by spending the oil money on new government-run projects. But these projects are not only overmanned and inefficient, like much of the country's bloated and technologically backward public sector; they also increase the demand for consumer goods and services, driving up inflation.
Ahmadinejad has continued this trend. He has generated considerable personal good will in poorer communities, but hardly anyone I asked could honestly say that their lives had gotten better during his presidency. He fought to lower interest rates, which drove up lending, leading to inflation and capital flight. The government cannot risk infuriating the public with the austerity measures that would be required in order to solve its deep-rooted economic problems. But as long as its short-term fixes continue to fail, the government will go on being unpopular. The last two presidents have lost their constituencies over this issue. And so officials seek to distract people from their economic woes with ideological posturing and anti-Western rhetoric. Not only has this lost its cachet with much of the Iranian public, it also serves to compound Iran's economic problems by blackening its image abroad. ''Iran has not sorted out its basic problem, which is to be accepted in the international community as a respectable government,'' Alizadeh said. ''Investors do not take it seriously. This is a political crisis, not an economic crisis.''
For a Western traveler in Iran these days, it is hard to avoid a feeling of cognitive dissonance. From a distance, the Islamic republic appears to be at its zenith. But from the street level, Iran's grand revolutionary experiment is beset with fragility. The state is in a sense defined by its contradictions, both constitutional and economic. It cannot be truly stable until it resolves them, and yet if it tries to do so, it may not survive.