Kelly McParland: Politics, economics ... and water ... threaten Iranian regime

In King of Kings, his recounting of events leading to the 1979 fall of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty, author Scott Anderson depicts the crisis as a catastrophic mix of  failures: on the U.S. side hubris, ignorance, incompetence, and a fierce determination to ignore the obvious; on the Iranian side corruption, inequality, megalomania and a leader catastrophically blind to the impending storm.

Then-president Jimmy Carter was too distracted to grasp what was happening; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Shahs, Light of the Aryans, never did come to understand.

Today’s U.S. administration is undoubtedly much better and more accurately informed about developments in Tehran, which threaten the current regime much as its predecessors did the Pahlavi throne. But Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is both as powerful and autocratic, and if anything more ruthless, than the Shah. At 36 years of absolute power, he’s ruled just two fewer than Pahlavi.

He faces an outbreak of rage much like the one that ultimately forced the departure of the aging and ailing Shah. Many of the conditions are similar: a collapsing economy, crushing social divisions, rampant corruption and a convergence of anger among groups across society that share little but their hatred for a leadership they blame for their misery.

The trigger in the 1979 revolt was the uniting figure of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the intransigent Islamic scholar intent on replacing the monarchy with a theocratic Islamic state. No such figure has emerged as yet to threaten Khamenei, his successor. And while there are many reasons for Iranians’ discontent, a key factor is not political or religious but far more prosaic: Iran’s lakes and rivers are running dry. There’s not enough water. The 10 million residents of the country’s capital were told this summer they might have to evacuate the city due to the regime’s inability to keep the taps running and the toilets flushing.

Environmentalists point to climate change as the culprit, the evidence being six years of ruinous drought. But Iran is an arid country that has experienced droughts for centuries. It long ago developed a system for handling them, known as qanats, tunnels dug into hillsides to tap underground water, which successfully served both urban and agricultural needs for more than 2,000 years.

Today is different in that corruption and official mismanagement have led to gross mishandling of supply and distribution of available resources.

In the years after 1979 revolution the new regime went on a binge of dam-building, many of them linked to commercial interests involving the Revolutionary Guard, the brutal and much-feared security force answerable directly to Khamenei.

As many as 600 dams have been built since the revolution, which had fewer than 20 at the time. Many, including five serving Tehran, are all but depleted, down to between five and 10 per cent of capacity, rendering them incapable of meeting demand.

Satellite photos show Lake Urmia, once the largest in the Middle East, all but dry. Officials have long diverted far more water from the Karun River — the country’s longest and largest — than manageable, reducing the flow to less than a quarter its original capacity. Much of it has gone to large-scale industrial operations linked to the Guards, but 90 per cent is destined for high-intensity agriculture needed to meet government aims of producing the bulk of the country’s own food.

The proliferation of dams produced vast open reservoirs that increased water loss through evaporation. Dams have also been built on rivers too small to handle them, while millions of wells have been sunk and pumped dry over the past 40 years, eliminating wetlands and aquifers essential to crops. Adding to domestic mismanagement, neighbouring Afghanistan completed the vast Pashdan dam hydro-electric project in August giving it control over two rivers feeding Iran, including supplies to the country’s second biggest city.

The water crisis has led to an exodus of rural-dwellers from their homes to urban areas in search of work. A report citing IRNA, the official government news agency, indicated that almost 45 per cent of rural villages were deserted. The U.S. State Department estimates more than 16 million people have already fled the countryside “and are now living in shantytowns.”

The rural flight leaves the government with hundreds of thousands of new arrivals converging on already-overcrowded cities in search of jobs and homes at a time they are barely able to function as is. Many of the newcomers are young and impatient, less willing to suffer the strictures their parents endured in the name of the revolution, unimpressed by the poverty and squalor they find, and willing to express their discontent in public despite escalating threats of a crackdown.

As did the Shah, who vacillated between dire warnings and efforts to buy off protesters, the current regime has wavered in its response. After offering economic concessions to ameliorate the pain of 50 per cent inflation and a collapse in the currency — the rial fell about 45 per cent against the U.S. dollar last year and by one calculation is worth roughly 20,000 less now than it was in 1979 — the government shifted Friday to threats of a response that “will be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”

Iran’s mullahs have survived numerous previous outbursts of public rage and may yet survive this one, but the extent of the protests is clearly unsettling them. Cries of “Death to the dictator,” and “Pahlavi will return” challenge the very foundations of the revolution. Demonstrations have spread far beyond the capital to virtually all Iran’s provinces and a reported 180 cities. On Friday the government shut down the Internet and international telephone networks following calls by Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah, to continue and expand the protests.

Pahlavi lives in the U.S., as does his mother, the former Empress Farah, who has a home outside Washington. The actual extent of his popularity remains unclear but mere mention of his name is a stark reversal from decades of vitriol.

Khamenei, 86, blames Israel and U.S. President Donald Trump for the protests, warning in a televised address Friday: “The Islamic Republic came to power through the blood of several hundred thousand honourable people and it will not back down in the face of those who deny this.”

No doubt he means it. Hospitals report being overwhelmed with casualties and corpses, as 648 protesters have reportedly been killed, as of Monday afternoon. But a previous generation showed there comes a point where violence is no longer enough to halt an angry people who have had enough. A regime that can’t keep the taps running can’t expect to survive forever.

National Post