Few Americans have followed Iran and the Iranian resistance more devotedly than Michael Ledeen. In books and articles he has explained the confrontation between Iran and the United States – and the coming crisis of the mullah regime. In his important and urgent new book, Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West, he deploys a lifetime of insight and experience to illuminate one of the modern world’s most dangerous crises. Over the next days, we’ll post here some short extracts from the book – but no extract can do justice to Michael’s work. Read the whole thing, and read it as soon as you can.
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The regime in Tehran has long since lost any semblance of popular support, and has maintained power only through the systematic use of terror against its people. It cannot claim popularity on the basis of its accomplishments, because twenty-three years of theocracy have produced ruin and misery. Four million people have fled the revolution, most of them well educated and highly skilled. The data on those trapped by the tyrants are startling, but altogether in keeping with the Islamic Revolution’s historic indifference to social misery. As Khomeini neatly summarized it, the revolution was about religion, “not about the price of watermelons.”
• One-third to one-half of all Iranians are malnourished.
• The average income for more than half the population is $1.40 per day.
• The gross domestic product is less than half of what it was in 1978.
• Per capita income is 7 percent below what it was before the revolution.
• Iranian economists estimate capital flight at up to $3 billion a year, and it may well be significantly greater, as those with money send it to safe havens abroad.
• The country’s wealth is firmly in the hands of the regime’s elite families. More than 80 percent of the country’s gross national product comes from the petroleum industry, which is entirely in government hands. The mullahs have effectively ruined this primary source of national wealth: Oil production is currently around three million barrels per day. It was 6.2 at the end of the shah’s rule. According to a study released by the National Academy of Sciences on Christmas Day 2006, oil exports are expected to decline by upwards of 10 percent a year for the foreseeable future.
• According to the International Monetary Fund, Iran requires a crude oil price of at least ninety-five dollars a barrel. The drop in crude prices to below fifty dollars a barrel is very destabilizing, since it seems the Iranian stabilization fund has only enough money to buy imported gasoline for a year, and it may well be even less than that.
• Inflation has run wild. The exchange rate was seventy rials to the dollar in 1978, and it was about 9,300 in the spring of 2007, when a new fifty-thousand rial banknote (graced with an atomic symbol) was introduced.
• Inflation reached nearly 30 percent in October 2008.
• There are said to be more than fifty thousand suicides per year.
With the passage of time, conditions for the Iranian people have steadily worsened, and popular efforts to win even minor concessions—such as the steady tempo of strikes and demonstrations by workers who have not been paid for many months— are crushed with an iron fist.
Click here for part two in this series.
Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press
13 responses so far
1 MI-GOPer // Dec 10, 2009 at 7:29 am
Whoops, I saw the headline and thought: Wow, an article on FrumForum critical of the democrat party & their mullahs plundering the US treasury and our civil institutions… only to find out, alas, it really is all about Iran.
With the Obama Office of Fishy Comments, with an attempt to begin an Obama’s Enemies List, with the concerted efforts of the far Left to invade and inflame conservative blogs to distract and disrupt rebuilidng the Party (Oh, look, over there, it’s a Palin sighting), with the Prez using his best Chicago Thug StreetTalk about “callin’ out those who lie about my plans”, the WH doublespeak that allows THEIR vote frauders to condemn Karzai’s election improprieties, massive govt corruption by diverting tax dollars to WH political cronies and pals, tax cheats and liars and socialists filling the Cabinet… it might be easy to think that Washington is becoming more like Tehran.
But that would be –now according to the WH and democrat trolls– “un”patriotic and worthy of someone sending over a boxload of Rachel MadCow scratch & sniff scorn.
2 balconesfault // Dec 11, 2009 at 8:21 am
Blind, irrational, all-consuming rage.
3 ottovbvs // Dec 11, 2009 at 9:42 am
……Not that the same wouldn’t be true of say Saudia Arabia or Egypt?…….Ledeen is so off his head it’s hard to take anything he writes seriously and that’s the problem for the right on Iran…….it’s unquestionably a noxious regime but it clearly has the support of roughly half the country and its hands on all the levers of power which makes it to all intents and purposes unassailable…..Ledeen, Frum and their cohorts who view it principally through the prism of Zionism are so tainted by exaggeration, distortions, even at its most extreme terrorism inside Iran, that no one outside the lunatic fringe takes what they say seriously even though some part of it may be true……that’s the problem with hyperbole and operatic language…….. it devalues everything that surrounds it.
4 MI-GOPer // Dec 11, 2009 at 10:07 am
BlankHead offers: “Blind, irrational, all-consuming rage”.
What does NancyPelosi have to do with this thread?
Oh, you’re upset about the reference to your idol Rachel Madcow’s scratch and sniff scorn? I’m sorry the truth offends you BlankHead.
How many seconds to a denial that you never listen to Rachel? It’s more convincing if you take off your BlankHead (hearts) Rachel pj’s.
5 balconesfault // Dec 11, 2009 at 10:45 am
Otto: Not that the same wouldn’t be true of say Saudia Arabia or Egypt
Well, essentially there is a truth to the idea that Iran is being run very poorly. Which is why the US should keep our noses out of there, except to continue to focus international pressure on Iran’s nuclear program.
Countries that are that poorly mismanaged, with no democratic means to effect real change, implode on themselves. But tyrants can hold onto power longer by focussing people’s anger on foreign enemies.
6 MI-GOPer // Dec 11, 2009 at 11:21 am
BlankHead loks for the echo chamber pals from the TrollTribe, finds none, heads back under the rock with: “Countries that are that poorly mismanaged, with no democratic means to effect real change, implode on themselves.”
Oh yeah, my Village Idiot. That would explain Cuba, for instance, and dozens of other countries. Those mismanaged countries fall like rain drops. Yeah, you play with that tune a bit more –it has zero harmony.
7 teabag // Dec 11, 2009 at 11:26 am
Maybe if the USA had kept it’s fingers out of that particular pie the country would have been a different place. The CIA destabilized the country and put it’s puppet Shah in place. The result as usual chaos.
8 ottovbvs // Dec 11, 2009 at 12:13 pm
balconesfault // Dec 11, 2009 at 10:45 am
Otto: Not that the same wouldn’t be true of say Saudia Arabia or Egypt
“Well, essentially there is a truth to the idea that Iran is being run very poorly.”
……And Egypt is being well run?…..I agree largely about the nature of the regime in Iran although having visited Iran in the early 90’s it’s not as oppressive as you might think which is why I suspect it still has (narrowly) majority support……my point was that Ledeen and all the other neocons have emasculated their cred on this issue because of lies and distortions mainly because to them it’s all about Israel.
9 garlic // Dec 11, 2009 at 12:58 pm
MI-GOPer — who are the mullah’s you’re referring to in “critical of the democrat party & their mullahs plundering the US treasury and our civil institutions”?
10 ottovbvs // Dec 11, 2009 at 2:01 pm
garlic // Dec 11, 2009 at 12:58 pm
“MI-GOPer — who are the mullah’s you’re referring to in “critical of the democrat party & their mullahs plundering the US treasury and our civil institutions”?”
…….Mullah gopher?……gopher has many roles……Emily Post yesterday…….the mad mullah today
11 balconesfault // Dec 11, 2009 at 2:23 pm
otto: well, Egypt gets a healthy feed of cash from the US to play nice with Israel – which helps stability quite a bit, I’m sure.
you’re right about the neocons. nothing they say about Iran can be read without the filter of their desire to have invaded that country about 5 years ago, and ongoing frustration that it continues not to happen.
Of all the things George Bush did while in office, in the long run the most valuable single thing may have been telling Dick Cheney “no” when Cheney was chomping at the bit to bomb or invade Iran.
12 ottovbvs // Dec 11, 2009 at 2:39 pm
balconesfault // Dec 11, 2009 at 2:23 pm
“otto: well, Egypt gets a healthy feed of cash from the US to play nice with Israel – which helps stability quite a bit, I’m sure.”
…….that’s the danegeld we’re paying for Egyptian good behavior but the regime is at least as repressive as that of Iran……the downside of course as happened in Iran is that the “geld” is spread amongst a oligarchic class and most of it never reaches the common folks and at some point the place blows up……..when Mubarak departs we need to be very nervous……not immediately but in the inevitably volatile aftermath when different factions and individuals jockey for power
13 Iran by the Numbers « Free Market Mojo // Dec 14, 2009 at 3:29 am
[...] by the Numbers Here is an excerpt on the economic conditions in Iran from Michael Ledeen’s upcoming book, Accomplice to Evil: [...]
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