I find Iran to be a truly baffling civilization. Iranians are so educated and orderly, but the country punches so below its weight class in terms of prosperity.
Geographically speaking, over 80% of Iran’s land is classified as arid or semi-arid, and it is likely to face over 5°C of warming by the end of the century: the impacts of climate change will likely be more severe in Iran than the regional average. The region suffers from extreme weather including both droughts and flooding, seismic activity in the form tectonic uplift, particularly near the Makran coast, and constant attacks: economic attack by sanction, cyber attack on energy infrastructure, and lately even kinetic attack from neighbors. The fact that the regime hasn’t collapsed is a testament to Persian, Iranian and Islamic culture, and I hope its people find ways to prosper when the deck is so stacked against them.
Iran isn’t a breadbasket exactly, but it has more arable land per person than Germany, Italy, the UK, or Ireland. And vastly more than Japan. It’s relatively temperate now—future warming doesn’t explain its current situation. On top of all that, it has oil! In 1980, just after the revolution, Iran had a PPP GDP per capita above Taiwan, China, and South Korea. And only modestly behind Poland. Today those countries are far ahead. Same for Thailand, Malaysia, and Turkey.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
I completely agree with you. We who wish well on Iranians can only hope the situation is speedily rectified and the regime will finally fall, ending the oppression, want, war and poverty they have inflicted on so many millions of people both within and without their borders.
Almost everything you’ve described, except for natural disasters, is an own goal. There’s literally no need for the country to be poor and on the brink of collapse. They are doing it to themselves.
Their government spends itself into poverty fighting proxy wars against Israel both directly and indirectly through sanctions. It’s a theocracy so economics is not the most important thing to their leaders.
It is a crying shame and the Iranians deserve better. At the moment 16 million people may find themselves without water in the near future. I'm lost for words.
If one positive thing could be found in this situation it might finally be the thing that brings down the regime. I think it's fair to say this year has been an annus horribilis for them.
They will still be empty eventually. It might still become a stable situation though. If you look at pictures from North Korea the only person who doesn't look malnourished is Kim Jong Un. Otoh water is different from food. Also it's the middle east. They might have to cut back on their aggression but their antagonists (who by now is literally everyone) won't.
Dont forget the mighty CIA.. so mighty they couldn't even stop trump from ruining it for the military industrial conplex with isolationism. Anything to prevent the realization that left policies are and where rejected by the people.. if you start introspection, the movement immolates.
Nothing baffling about it. Religion was used by a clerical class to marshall the lumpen masses with promises of free handouts in this world and paradise in the next. Their own thinking set (of the ruling clique) are bound by ideology - whether as matter of actual belief or means of governance - so they do not make any decisions based on national interest or reason. It is the ideology that does the 'thinking'.
(Sounds familiar? Warning bells for other locals, maybe? ..)
Most educated Iranians you know, btw, are (drum roll) in diaspora, for good reasons.
It's hard to manage a water supply and economy in Tehran when your top minds are busy running proxy wars in Lebanon and Iraq and funding or supporting ones in Syria, Yemen, and Gaza [1, 2].
It's sad to such a great people subjugated by their government.
Dams blocking the inflow to Lake Urmia that almost dried up nowadays were built by the Shah, for example. Man-made environmental damage and corruption aren't new by any measure, as well as unstable water levels and shortages in arid zones. See e.g. Aral Sea which fluctuated in the range of dozens of meters over centuries before finally drying up, which was enough to establish and subsequently abandon multiple settlements on the lake bed during the Mongol Empire.
It's an Islamic theocracy with nuclear as well as regional hegemonic ambitions; what about the corresponding impoverishment of its citizens is "baffling" to you?
There is nothing baffling about it. When the world's superpower targets you for destruction, it's impossible to prosper. What's baffling is how long they've been able to persevere.
Imagine if the US targeted germany or japan or saudi arabia for destruction. They'd be in far worse situation than iran.
Hacker News crowd does its emotional outrage voting but the similarities are uncanny: Khomeini's first famous speech when he got back was promising free water, electricity, and busses.
They are delivering on the free water promise by setting Qty=0.
One of the reasons that Iran's regime has failed to prepare for global climate is that fundamental Islam rejects modern science because it instead supports supernaturalism in many areas.
Pipes to quench a 10-million city through 100 kms of mountains (140km by road), going up 2 kms from the sea level? That's more than Israel's max distance from the sea (and it's mostly flat).
The California State Water Project [1] pumps water for over 25 million people across 1,100 kilometers over 1.5km of mountains. It's possible, but that said, the CSWP is one of the largest civil engineering projects in human history and the largest single user of electricity in the state so it's no small feat.
I'm ignorant but aren't oil pipelines much longer? They don't need to traverse mountain ranges but still. Either way i can't imagine such a project would be possible in an emergency time scale without the combined assistance of the US, Israel (desalination experts) and China. i know absolutely nothing about these things, so i don't know if it's even theoretically possible with their help.
Apparently the highest oil pipeline throughput (Druzhba) is 1.4 million barrels per day, which amounts to some 2000 liters per second. That would be 20 liters/person/day - kinda maybe enough to move the needle, but not quite.
Building this sort of pipeline today is about $1-2M per km on flat land. I'm not aware of comparable pipelines in the mountains.
Then, desalination requires energy, and Iran already faces blackouts here and there, there just isn't much spare capacity.
I think on a similar scale would be the Chinese South–North Water Transfer Project , which has taken several decades to eventually move 44.8 cubic km of fresh water via canls/aqueducts etc through some mountanious terrain.
Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.
Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
The linked article states that their president has suggested that evacuations may be necessary if rationing isn't effective. I was a little shocked when I read this suggestion from another source, but public figures are talking about it.
Israel is not stuck in the death cult mentality, whe life is but a trainstation to the afterlifr and investments into the living are seen as wasteful. Teheran will not wither "inshallsh"
I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare of evacuating a metro area with 16 million people. Where do they go? Where has sufficient water to slake the thirst of that many?
it would be one of the largest sudden migrations of people in history.
to put this in perspective, 13M people fled during the Syrian Civil War. 5.7M people fled Ukraine. The evacuation of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina was 1.2M people.
Never under estimate China. AP News says China expected 270M cross region trips during the Chinese new year this year. Likely with millions out of Beijing alone by itself for this yearly event over 2 weeks.
That's not really permanent displacement though. A refugee crisis due to water scarcity looks a lot different than going home for a known major holiday for a set amount of time.
That's also half way across the world to a country that is not exactly on friendly terms with Iran (not as unfriendly as say usa is, but still not geopolitical friends)
Perhaps if they had put more resources toward maintaining their water infrastructure instead of spending on their nuclear arms ambitions, funding Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc., they might not have had this problem.
Governments like all institutions are able to do many things at once. Connecting their water problems to the issues you list is essentially a non sequitur absent specific evidence of either/or policy choices.
Governments have finite amounts of money. Both of these things (water infrastructure and fighting proxy wars) are capital intensive projects. Its reasonable to conclude less money spent on one would allow more money spent on another.
Even without that factor, Attention does matter. Governments can do multiple things, but in more dictatorial regimes, doing things well often require prioritization at the top, and there is a limited number of things the top can prioritize. Its one of the main failings of dictatorships in general: the top is afraid to appoint too competent middle management lest they rise up, so everything becomes very top down managed.
Additionally some of the issues causing this seem to be related to corruption in their military, like diverting water in unsustainable ways to support farming projects that have ties to people well connected to irgc. (To be fair, i dont know how true that is, i dont have a good source for that)
You can trace all their problems back to the 1979 Islamic revolution. If they would have simply kept the Shah as the ruler and stayed a client state to Britain, they wouldn't need to fund any of these militants, and would probably be a friend to western countries.
Its been 46 years, there have been opportunities for peace along the way if they wanted it. It would have required compromises though.
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
Iran in 1970s certainty wasn't a British client state, that's a dumb fucking claim. If anything they were a US client, not a British one. And even the claim that they were an US client is pretty weak. They were a pretty strong regional power back then and while they were clearly allied with the US, they had their own politics and strategies.
Analysis that looks at countries like Iran simply as tools of Superpowers is reductive Cold War area analysis that has gigantic blind spots.
So what you’re saying is if they stayed quiet and supplicant to the British while they drained their oil resources while the extreme elites made all the money, everything would be okay? The Islamic revolution was a populist revolution, supported by the vast majority of the country because their lives were shit.
This is an out of date take. Not long after the fracking boom that began in the mid 2000's, The US is now by far the world's largest oil producer. We used to produce less oil than Saudi Arabia, now we produce 66% more. We produce 4x the oil that Iran does. Oil is just not the same geopolitical force that it was in the 80's to 2010.
Pretty weak argument. Norway has been an oil producer for a long time and recent issues have nothing to do with oil and applies to everybody working with the US.
People focus to much on oil in international relation, its a factor but by far not the only one.
They spend quite a bit on water infrastructure, they just spend on the wrong water infrastructure. Just saying 'look at these other things government' isn't productive and applies to all things governments does. Spending more money isn't the solution if you spend on the wrong thing.
You gonna say the same about the consequence of events like Hurricane Katrina? Couple of less nukes, military contracts or whatever and you could have prevented the disaster.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
They could just stop being at war with Israel any time, it is a pointless choice.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
In the meantime i hope it rains.
It is a crying shame and the Iranians deserve better. At the moment 16 million people may find themselves without water in the near future. I'm lost for words.
If one positive thing could be found in this situation it might finally be the thing that brings down the regime. I think it's fair to say this year has been an annus horribilis for them.
(Sounds familiar? Warning bells for other locals, maybe? ..)
Most educated Iranians you know, btw, are (drum roll) in diaspora, for good reasons.
It's sad to such a great people subjugated by their government.
1: https://www.cfr.org/article/irans-regional-armed-network 2: https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/proxy-wars/map
It's an Islamic theocracy with nuclear as well as regional hegemonic ambitions; what about the corresponding impoverishment of its citizens is "baffling" to you?
Imagine if the US targeted germany or japan or saudi arabia for destruction. They'd be in far worse situation than iran.
Maybe Tehran just needs to tax the locals an additional 2% so they can finally start delivering…
They are delivering on the free water promise by setting Qty=0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latyan_Dam https://maps.app.goo.gl/UzQrPMR4iHRdbsuP7
Edit: TIL there can be different translations/spellings of Persian to English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Persian
Nearby Israel has desalination plants that seem to be working out well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Water_Project
Then, desalination requires energy, and Iran already faces blackouts here and there, there just isn't much spare capacity.
That is enough for drinking and probably enough for cooking which should be the priority in a situation like this.
Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.
Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
Some people will try to blame EVs for environmental damage when we have this monstrosity.
This situation was avoidable but it required investment years ago. Kind of too late now.
to put this in perspective, 13M people fled during the Syrian Civil War. 5.7M people fled Ukraine. The evacuation of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina was 1.2M people.
Even without that factor, Attention does matter. Governments can do multiple things, but in more dictatorial regimes, doing things well often require prioritization at the top, and there is a limited number of things the top can prioritize. Its one of the main failings of dictatorships in general: the top is afraid to appoint too competent middle management lest they rise up, so everything becomes very top down managed.
Additionally some of the issues causing this seem to be related to corruption in their military, like diverting water in unsustainable ways to support farming projects that have ties to people well connected to irgc. (To be fair, i dont know how true that is, i dont have a good source for that)
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
Analysis that looks at countries like Iran simply as tools of Superpowers is reductive Cold War area analysis that has gigantic blind spots.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/norway-seeks-deeper-sec...
People focus to much on oil in international relation, its a factor but by far not the only one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
Anyways my point was not really about hurricane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_executions_in_Iran