Allahpundit @ Hot Air:
Via The Lede and Business Insider, which has an eye-popping graph showing what’s happening to the rial right now. We’ve all got debate fee-vah tonight but I want to put this on your radar screen in case things start to spiral in Tehran. The point of nuclear sanctions was to put Iran’s economy in a vise so that public discontent would force the regime to either back down on uranium enrichment or risk destabilization from within. Here’s a destabilizing tremor now:
Clashes and at least one spontaneous protest erupted in Tehran on Wednesday over the plunging value of Iran’s currency, as black-market money-changers fought with riot police who were dispatched to shut them down, and hundreds of angry citizens demonstrated near the capital’s sprawling merchant bazaar, where many shops had closed for the day. The official media reported an unspecified number of arrests including two Europeans.
The clashes were the first instance of a violent intervention over the money-changing business in Tehran since the currency, the rial, which had been gradually losing value in recent years, dropped drastically over the past week, losing 40 percent of its worth against the dollar, to a record low…
“They spend billions of dollars to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, but now they say they have no money!,” one garment seller screamed as he was cheered on by others, witnesses reported. A team from Iran’s state television was nearly attacked when its reporter turned to the camera saying that the people behind him had been upset over a robbery.
Ahmadinejad’s been reduced to begging Iranians at press conferences not to convert their currency, which has lost four-fifths of its value this year, to something more stable. Israel, meanwhile, is sufficiently impressed that’s it veering away from the war track and towards calling for more sanctions. (Over the weekend, Israel’s finance minister claimed that Iran’s economy is on the verge of collapse.) One expert put it this way recently for WaPo:
“Two clocks are now running: a nuclear clock and regime-change clock,” said Clifford Kupchan, a former State Department official who now serves as a private consultant on the Middle East. “Sanctions have put a big hole in the revenue side of Iran’s budget, but the leadership doesn’t yet know that it’s on a cliff.”
“So are sanctions changing the nuclear program? No,” Kupchan said. “Are they buying time so the regime-change clock can run down? I’d say yes.”
Iran’s threatening to ramp up enrichment further if the current nuke talks fail, but they’re going to do that anyway.
As news outlets are showing, the Iranian regime doesn’t care about the welfare or lives of their populace.
The police are running roughshod over them to control the protests.
The regime is so focused on getting a bomb that the people’s suffering is irrelevant to them.
Their official line is that there is “no economic justification” for the rial’s dive.
Bottom line?
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “‘has made it his badge of honor to not yield under pressure.”
They will put their own people under the gun before they will give up their chance to create the global chaos they believe is needed before the 12th imam will emerge from the well he fell in hundreds of years ago.
This child (he was only 4 or 5 or 6 when he fell in the well) supposedly will usher in the global caliphate.
Seeing chaos among their own people only makes them more determined to continue down their self-destructive road.
One Iranian friend transferred in some funds from Iran which he needed for himself a few months ago, and got whacked with the disastrous crash of the Rial.
At the time my feeling was that the Rial would continue its downward spiral, though what has occurred since, is nothing if not a ‘crash.’ His reaction is mixed – it hurts him and his family because the current 36,000 or so Rial to the dollar is financially devastating, however, that is balanced by the hope that such a crash is what will finally bring down the religious regime.
The Iranians on this side of the pond hate the Ayatollahs and Mullahs with some passion. Some hate them for having brought Islamic fundamentalism to the country of their birth. I’m not referring to Iranians who left with the Shah, but more recent immigrants.