Trouble for Iran
December 28th, 2006At this moment, the Iranian regime is bringing itself a heap of trouble. The only question is, will the regime destroy itself or prompt its own destruction first? Politically, Mahmoud Ahmaniac! is not as popular in Iran as he is in Palestine, as his party lost in the country’s Congressional elections last week. So from that angle, the political one, the regime is losing power by the day. Then we get into economics, and this staggering story.
Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published Monday in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Iran’s economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.
Iran earns about $50 billion a year from oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 percent annually. In less than five years exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Stern predicted. For two decades, the United States has deployed military forces in the region in a strategy to pre-empt emergence of a regional superpower. Iraq was stopped in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but a hostile Iran remains a target of U.S. threats. The U.S. military exercises have not stopped Iran’s drive. But the report said the country could be destabilized by declining oil exports, hostility to foreign investment to develop new oil resources and poor state planning, Stern said.
We might call my points mahmoot, as whatever happens to Iran will be the result of Mahmoud, whether that mean his country collapses as a result of a war with Israel (prompting American intervention) or his own political and economic mismanagement.