Dying A Natural Death

Plummeting oil prices may give Bush Administration hawks a last-minute opportunity to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. With Nymex crude down nearly 50 percent from their recent all-time highs in August, some Washington planners are calculating that a post-attack oil price spike would now cost the U.S. and international economy dramatically less than in the months preceding the global financial crisis.

Iran’s advanced manufacturing capabilities, stockpile of critical components from abroad, and geographic dispersion of nuclear facilities greatly diminish, however, the probable effectiveness of such a an attack. The obstacles are in fact so difficult, it prompted Israeli professor and historian Benny Morris to call for a reconsideration of a preemptive nuclear strike against Iranian facilities in a January 2007 Jerusalem Post editorial.

Falling petroleum pricing could, however, become the greatest threat to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. His administration has frittered away billions of dollars in monthly energy and food subsidies alone. Many subsidies don’t reach the needy of Iranian society who now suffer annual inflation of more than 29% and resent the propertied elite that has emerged in the past decade. With oil exports make up 60 percent of the government budget, lower prices will damage the regime’s ability to soften hardship though government-sponsored projects and subsidies.

Iran’s young and educated urban middle class, squeezed by the same inflation and chaffing for more freedoms than the current hard-line mullahs allow, are no cheerleaders either for the Iranian President. As internal dissatisfaction grows and President Ahmadinejad is unable to uphold promises from his 2005 election to better the life of the average Iranian, foreign antagonists would do well to permit his regime to implode on its own.

As much as some American and Israeli officials have become frustrated with Iran and its nuclear aspirations, Iranians themselves have become even more frustrated with the dimming prospects for a better life. An attack now on Iran will provide a lifeline for the increasingly unpopular president and invigorate the grip of hard-line, anti-Western elements in Tehran. Let Ahmadinejad’s political death be natural and democratic, as well as carried out by the Iranians themselves. The Iranian President may sooner rather than later join George W. Bush in political retirement… or Governor Sarah Palin as a well-paid commentator on global affairs.

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~ by deadmanscurve on October 14, 2008.