When Iranians start abandoning their currency and trading it on the black market for Western currencies like the dollar and the euro or exchanging it for gold, this is considered an important indication of how badly their economy is doing and of their lack of trust in their government's policies, as well as the extent of the despair they have reached as a result of successive policies and of the costly confrontation being waged by Iran against the West due to accusations regarding its nuclear program. (The value of the US Dollar before the Iranian Revolution was 70 Rials, and today it has reached 40 thousand Rials!) A dismal economic situation like the one the Iranian economy has reached is supposed to spur any government to quickly take the initiative to assume its responsibilities and deal with the reasons for the crisis in order to restore its citizens' trust in their national currency, due to the effect of the collapse of this currency on the purchasing power of citizens, especially given the difficulty of covering the deficit in Iran's reserves of foreign currency as a result of Iranian assets being frozen in banks abroad. Yet Iran's leaders, as per their traditional method of confronting their country's crises, and instead of looking for mistakes in their policies and the exorbitant cost of the confrontation they are waging, have headed towards holding the forces of “global arrogance" responsible for the economic disaster that has stricken their country. And when one describes the economic situation in Iran as disastrous, it is no exaggeration. The price of the main food products has risen by 80 percent over a year, and the value of the Iranian Rial has decreased by the same rate over the past year, dropping by 40 percent over the past week. The US Dollar and gold have thus become the safest refuge trusted by Iranians instead of their local currency. A crisis such as this in any country that respects its citizens should have led to removing the government without hesitation. But that is not the case in Iran. Here the regime adopts the method of haughtiness in the face of “arrogance". Indeed, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei considered that the pressures to which Iran is being subjected are due to the “independence of the Iranian nation", as he described it. As for President Ahmadinejad, he accused the United States of waging “psychological war" against the Iranian people. And it seems that Ahmadinejad's knowledge of psychology is equivalent to his knowledge of history! Indeed, if the charge of “psychological war[fare]" proves true, it will be recorded as the first time this type of warfare has ever affected the value of currency and the price of bread and meat, instead of leading those affected by it to psychiatric hospitals. And when Iranian officials hold responsible all of their “enemies" for the consequences of the policies they are practicing and the war of tilting at windmills they are waging against the West, they are only doing so to avoid confronting what their policies have done to Iranians – having led to the harsh sanctions imposed by Western governments on Iran, implementing resolutions issued by the UN Security Council and by the countries of the European Union, which have recently imposed an embargo on Iranian oil exports, thus reducing by half Iran's revenue from this vital sector. Nevertheless, these sanctions, as harsh as they may be, have important positive aspects that should be paid heed to. Indeed, the sanctions have started to have an impact on the situation inside of Iran, leading citizens to become preoccupied with their livelihood concerns and to hold their government accountable for the disastrous results it has brought this major oil-rich country to. This should pave the way in terms of debate for a public discussion over the soundness of decisions made by the government, as well as allow the opposition to raise its voice in the street. This is what we have seen this week in the demonstrations of Tehran's Grand Bazaar traders, who were calling for the suspension of the nuclear program, the removal of the government and the cessation of funding to regional forces allied to it such as Hezbollah, in addition to the aid provided by Iran to the Syrian regime in its battle against the opposition, the cost of which has reached billions of dollars. Another positive aspect of this crisis is the fact that it blocks the path for Israel's attempts to move the conflict with Iran regarding its nuclear program from the phase of economic sanctions to that of military confrontation, which Netanyahu's government has been trying to draw the United States into waging. This provides the Obama Administration, which is in the first place rejecting the idea of such a confrontation, with the pretext that the sanctions are doing their job and that there is therefore no need to get implicated in military action, the results of which are not guaranteed, in addition to the grave threat it poses to the security of the Gulf region as a whole.
