Iran going broke?
This was a rather heavy read for a late Christmas night:
Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could disappear by 2015, a National Academy of Sciences analysis found.
And, I stumbled on this while trying to find the actual source document for the above information:
"The budget allocated to the government will run out by the end of (the Iranian month of) Azar (December 22)," the agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
"We are going to put forward a supplementary budget bill to cover the three remaining months (of the Iranian year, ending on March 20 2007) and the first two months of next year.
The president did not give a reason why the budget had run over.
Now, Roger Stern ( NAS ), assumes we can peacefully wait out the current Iranian crisis. However, I don’t think it’s going to be quite that simple. Apparently the Iranian government realizes it’s hitting a crisis already, hence the rush for nuclear power. Now, with Iraq totally destabilized, Pakistan almost always destabilized, and several other Middle Eastern countries in a proverbial mess, I’m not sure a destabilized Iran is a good thing. Althought the government may go belly up, that doesn’t mean a lot of individuals have made a gazillion bucks already. I am assuming Stern thinks that once the Iranian coffers are bare, they’ll peacefully enter the civilized world and quit doing the bad things the US is fighting against. I think Stern, if that is truly his thinking, is horribly naive. Even with the total collapse of government rule in Iraq, with the offer to assist them in forming the government of their choice, the Iraqis have chosen to a large degree to endorse total chaos based on very selective religious preferences. It’s not good enough that they are all Muslem, you have to be a certain KIND of Muslem to avoid the car bombs and death squads. That’s how deep these fanatic convictions go. I can’t see how Iran is any different than the Cradle of Mankind. If the Iranian government does go broke, and the military collapses with it, we’ll just get more fanatical chaos. That hasn’t done the US any good at all. It was the chaos in Afghanistan that allowed one individual to garner so much influence and power that he could destroy the World Trade Centers in New York CIty, USA, while never leavind his cave. So, I can’t go along with Stern’s conclusion that the Iranian situation could resolve itself peacefully if we just wait it out. Chaos has never benefitted the US or the world and only leaves voids for tyrants and radicals to fill.
Now, what I think will work is to allow the Russians to give the Iranians all the energy, via nuclear power, they want. However, until Iran is more stable and world-friendly, just run lines INTO Iran.
And until those lines are finished, bomb the hell out of any nuclear plants Iran builds.
