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January 21st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
But the underlying reason is his regime’s obsession with another, less stable
metal – the uranium 235 that the West believes it is secretly enriching for
a nuclear bomb.
On Monday the price Tehran pays for continuing that programme will spike
sharply too, when European Union foreign ministers meet in Brussels to
approve a ban on importing Iranian crude oil – a stiff blow to a regime
whose vast energy wealth has long kept it afloat.
The new sanctions come just three weeks after the US President, Barack Obama,
signed a law that effectively allows Washington to ban any country that buys
Iranian oil from access to the US financial system.
The parallel US and EU measures, the toughest to date, follow the failure of
almost a decade of negotiations, which most diplomats believe has Tehran has
simply used to buy extra time. Now, with the regime thought to be within a
year of nuclear weapons capability, and mounting fears that Israel will
attack before then, the West is gambling that economic pressure may
ultimately succeed where political pressure has failed.
“This is a serious move to tighten the pressure on Iran
and bring them back to the negotiating table,” said one European
diplomat. “It is designed to hit them where it hurts, significantly
reducing their oil revenue.”
On the streets of Tehran, the smog-filled, mountain-ringed Iranian capital,
the sense of impending crisis is already clear from the queues in the gold
and money changing shops in the sprawling bazaars.
Since October, as new sanctions came to seem ever more likely, the riyal has
slid from around 10,500 to the dollar to nearly 18,000 last week, sometimes
by as much as 500 riyals per day. The result has been a run on both dollars
and gold.
The government has responded in typically authoritarian fashion, restricting
how many dollars an individual can buy, and sending plain-clothes police to
arrest anyone dealing on what is now a booming black currency market – but
to little avail. At the few authorised foreign exchange shops still selling
dollars, demand is so great that other currency dealers have started hiring
people to queue in line for them, according to residents of the Iranian
capital talking through intermediaries to The Sunday Telegraph.
“I was paid 150,000 riyals (£5) to stand in line for a currency dealer,”
said one day labourer. “There were 20 to 30 others like me in this line.”
The gold market has been the same: sovereigns, which used be bought mainly as
wedding gifts, are fetching around 7,750,000 riyals (£274) for a
quarter-ounce, twice what they cost in 2010. In three days alone last week,
said Mr Fathi, their price rose 15 per cent.
Combined with inflation rates of at least 20 per cent, mass bankruptcies have
ensued. Half the firms on Tehran’s biggest industrial estate have gone bust,
according to the Iranian Labour News Agency.
“My business has almost been totally ruined because transferring money
from Iran to foreign sellers has become very hard,” said Naser
Alikhani, 42, who runs a print machinery firm. “I’m moving what remains
it abroad and laying off all 15 staff in my Tehran office.”
Iranian import firms also find it impossible to get outside lines of credit,
and the costs of illegally-imported luxuries, such as Apple I-phones, have
risen by a third in recent weeks. Some shops are now finding it more
profitable to stockpile goods rather than sell them, exacerbating the
shortages, and Iranians are watching with alarm as their savings peter away.
“I have lost 40 per cent of my savings in the past three months and 40
per cent of the value of my home due to the falling riyal,” said Marjan
Babaei, 48, an arts dealer. “The government blames this on sanctions
but I think most people feel its mainly to do with mismanagement and
corruption.”
The economic picture will darken even more with the new sanctions on oil
sales, which, thanks to high global prices, have earned Mr Ahmadinejad’s
government some £350 billion in revenues over the last five years. Although
the EU boycott will take up to a year to bite because of grace periods given
to debt-laden Greece, Spain and Italy – Iran’s biggest EU oil customers – to
find new supplies, it could eventually rob Tehran of a fifth of its oil
sales and perhaps a higher share of its oil income.
Analysts point out that through the use of complex front companies, and simply
lowering their prices, the Iranian regime will probably always find buyers
for its oil, just as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did. But by forcing them to sell
at ever lower rates, Mr Ahmadinejad’s income will be significantly dented.
Whether it will help bring about a change of Iran’s political direction is
another matter.
Parliamentary elections are due in March, but supporters of the reformist
Green movement, who were jailed in their thousands after 2009’s disputed
elections, are either banned from standing or unwilling to do so on
principle, fearing a fraudulent contest again.
And despite the “Arab Spring” felling regimes elsewhere in the
Middle East, Iranian faith in the power of street politics is at an ebb. “The
way the regime cracked down on the opposition leaves no hope of any change
in the near future,” said Ali Rezai, 28, an engineer. “Although if
it is ever revived I will join in again.”
Instead, the main threat to Mr Ahmadinejad comes from factions within his own
hard-line camp, in particular that of Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the unelected “Supreme
Leader”. Mr Ahmadinejad has accused Mr Khameini’s aides of deliberately
escalating confrontation with the West, hoping that new sanctions will ruin
the economy and discredit him.
The power struggle is less about ideology and more about the growing threat
the clerical class sees from Mr Ahmadinejad and his neo-conservative camp.
Rather like the Protestant zealots of 17th century Europe, the
neo-conservatives regard the clerical class as corrupt and over-privileged,
and query its untrammelled power.
Yet neither side are much interested in compromise with the West on the
nuclear issue. Indeed, for many, another spell of the kind of battle and
sacrifice experienced during the brutal 1980-88 war with Iraq is just what
is needed again to keep the Islamic revolution pure and free of Western
temptation. By that yardstick, even a disintegrating currency and a
bankrupt-ridden economy is unlikely to change their minds – in turn, making
it all the more likely that the Israeli prime minister, Benhamin Netanyahu,
might back a pre-emptive Israeli strike.
“At the end of the day, Netanyahu doesn’t want to be remembered as the
man who let Israel face the existential threat,” said Mark Fitzpatrick,
Iran expert at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He said it was far from certain, though, whether Israeli or even the much
heavier “bunker buster” bombs being developed by the US could
penetrate the most secure Iranian nuclear sites such as the new facility at
Fordo, which is buried 80 metres beneath a mountain. A failed attempt would
bring the worst of all scenarios: massive Iranian retaliation across the
Middle East, and extra justification for Tehran to continue the program as a
defence against future aggression.
Right now, however, most ordinary are concentrating on their more immediate
battle for survival.
“I was only a child when the war with Iraq finally ended, but I remember
those days very well, and it’s horrifying to think about another war coming,”
said Mr Rezai. “But with the economy as it is, nobody can even plan for
tomorrow, never mind the future.”
Iranians quoted in this article asked for pseudonyms to be used.
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