The Iranian regime doesn't get anxious when faced with crises. On the contrary, it thrives on them. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, it seems that crises are actually this regime's raison d'être. The leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, formed a regime that thrives off of external conflicts, but does not shy from internal ones either. To survive in such an atmosphere, the regime needed to build itself the holy trinity: The Revolutionary Guard, the Basij (the regime's paramilitary volunteer militia) and the lower classes. These became the regime's wall of defense, protecting it against any and all problems. The Islamic clergy, the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij thugs connected their respective fates to one another. The story of the poorer class is a little more problematic. To preserve its allegiance, it must be consistently subsidized. When oil revenues are high it is very easy to provide meat and rice to the poor. When oil exports take a hit, support from the masses follows suit. The lower class became the regime's primary pillar of support. During the protests in 1999 (following the shutting down of a weekly paper), and in 2009 (after presidential election fraud was revealed), it was the lower class, which lives off the government dole, that took to the streets to show the world their support for the leadership. These weren't staged protests. Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were always well aware of who they could count on. However, this week's events and the continuing devaluation of the Rial Iran's currency which has lost 75 percent of its value over the past year prove that the economy is in trouble, perhaps on the verge of collapse. Aside from the six rounds of sanctions imposed on Iran by the U.N. Security Council since 2006, in July came the European Union's embargo of Iran's oil, which in a matter of weeks caused severe damage to the Iranian economy. A country in which oil accounts for 85% of its export is seeing its oil production plummet from two million barrels per day to 800,000. The regime can no longer subsidize the weaker populations and the relatives of the shahids (holy martyrs) who sacrificed their lives in the Iran-Iraq war. Is the regime's wall of defense crumbling? At this rate the Iranian regime could lose one of the main components of the divine trinity that it constructed for itself, and not the least important. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is correct when he estimates that the protests by the opposition in Iran will return "even bigger than before." Lieberman predicts an Iranian "Tahrir Square." It really is a matter of time. Perhaps yesterday we couldn't foresee the sprouts of the "Persian Spring," but the grave economic problems could hurry it along. What we saw yesterday in Ferdowsi Square (Tehran's foreign currency black market) is far from what we saw in June of 2009 during the waves of the reformist "Green" movement protests, which preceded the Arab Spring, but were left without support from Washington. We're still not there, just as the sanctions have yet to stop the Iranian centrifuges from spinning. The sanctions have already had an effect, but it's still not enough. Will the new sanctions paralyzing Iran's Central Bank succeed in paralyzing its nuclear program? This isn't certain either, but if we don't try we won't know. The regime promises to carry on with its nuclear project. And if there is no bread to eat let the people plant some nuclear seeds.
