The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement the West made with Iran in 2015 looked like a godsend for the mullahs’ regime. In exchange for suspending its nuclear weapons program for a decade, the ostracized Islamic Republic received $1.7 billion in cash and the promise of billions more as companies in the United States and Europe rushed to make their own deals in the country with economic sanctions lifted. But the accord that former president Barack Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry spearheaded might end up having the opposite effect. What the mullahs did with the money highlighted to Iranians how little their government cares about them, helping spark protests whose violent repression has made headlines around the world. With demonstrations throughout the country every day for a week and showing no signs of stopping, despite a death toll of 45 and rising, the JCPOA might one day prove a contributing factor to the fall of the Islamic Republic—though that’s hardly what its Western negotiators intended.
Obama, who has made a number of political pronouncements since leaving the White House a year ago, has said nothing about the unrest in Iran. It’s a repeat of his performance as president in 2009, when the Green Movement sprung up to protest what appeared to be the fraudulent reelection of the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime violently quashed the demonstrations, killing at least 110 people and jailing 10,000 in the course of nine months, but Obama remained silent, much to the disappointment of the protesters, who chanted a rhyme in Farsi, “Obama, Obama, are you with them or with us?” His retirement has not gone unnoticed in Iran.
“There is also one big difference now compared with 2009—the Obama policy of appeasement of the Iranian regime has finished,” says Shabnam Madadzadeh, a 30-year-old human-rights activist who fled Iran just over a year ago, after spending five years in prison. “Obama always helped the regime when it was in trouble. Now the regime no longer has this asset, and this has its impact on the people in the street, to realize that the international community is on their side and is not siding with the regime.”
The unrest that’s become the biggest challenge to the ruling regime since 2009 began with a protest against corruption and inflation on December 28 in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city. It was triggered, observers say, by news that the government was unveiling a budget cutting spending on social services and increasing spending on the military, as well as a spike in the price of foodstuffs. In the week of December 22, the cost of eggs rose 9 percent from the previous week, making them 54 percent more expensive than they had been a year earlier, according to the Central Bank of Iran. The outrage soon spread to the rest of the country while taking on a broader anti-government tone that targeted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. Chants of “Bread, work, freedom” turned into “Young people are unemployed, and mullahs have all the positions” and “The nation is destitute while the leader is acting like God,” then “Reformers, hardliners, the game is now over.” And soon the polite “Khamenei, forgive us, but it is time for you to go” gave way to “Death to the dictator” and “Death to Rouhani.”
Yet “Scattered Protests Erupt in Iran Over Economic Woes” is how the New York Times described the situation, and many outlets followed suit. “The protests are driven by socioeconomic grievances, not political aspiration,” insisted German-based Iranian political analyst Adnan Tabatabai. Days after the protesters began referencing the regime’s adventurism abroad, with chants such as “Death to Hezbollah,” “Leave Syria alone, think about us instead,” “Never mind Palestine, think about us,” and “Forget about Gaza and Lebanon; I’ll sacrifice my life for Iran,” some Western journalists and commentators still characterized the ferment as strictly economic in nature. “In Iran, tight budget sparks nationwide protests” was PBS Newshour’s headline on January 3. “The price of eggs in Iran went up 50%, and 21 people were killed in the protests that followed” was a Business Insider headline the day before.
Higher prices might have served as a spark, but it wasn’t a sudden economic downturn that set a fire under the mullahs’ feet. Iran’s economy cratered after the 1979 revolution deposed the shah and created the theocracy that has ruled ever since. In the decade and a half before the revolution, Iran’s gross national product grew, on average, at an annual rate of 13.2 percent. In the decade after, it fell by an annual average of 1.7 percent. The economy only got back up to its pre-revolution level in 2007 and has gone up and down since then. Inflation was at the wild rate of 35 percent in 2013, but it was at 9.04 percent in 2016, the first time it had dropped to single digits in a quarter-century, and hasn’t increased sharply: It was 10.53 percent last year. Growth did slow in 2017, but that’s because the economy made extraordinary gains the year before, thanks to the sanctions relief the JCPOA provided—the IMF estimated Iran had a 12.5 percent real GDP growth rate in 2016 and 3.5 percent in 2017. Unemployment, though, saw an uptick in 2016, and it remained about the same in 2017.
More telling is the fact that many of the slogans heard on the streets in 130 cities over the past week echoed concerns dissidents detailed last summer, long before Rouhani unveiled his latest budget and egg prices went through the roof. In Paris in July, at an annual gathering of members and supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, I interviewed three young activists who had been jailed and tortured in Iran by Rouhani’s regime and had all left the country within the last two years. The image of the “pallets of cash” the Obama administration sent to the mullahs was still in their minds. “They put the money—cash—in an airplane. They sent it to Iran,” Farzad Madadzadeh, Shabnam’s brother, said. “None of that money reached the Iranian people. It reached Assad, Hezbollah.”
Arash Mohammadi was jailed three times for his efforts to help Iran’s huge number of economically disadvantaged citizens. The regime considered such humanitarian work a seditious affront because it revealed—simply by its existence—that the mullahs were stealing from the people. “It’s 100 percent a danger as a threat to the regime because it’ll become clear that for 38, 39 years, this government has done nothing for the people,” Arash said.
The JCPOA made that reality public. The activists confirm that everyday Iranians knew about the cash the Obama administration sent to their leaders—and soon understood they would never see a dime of it. They read reports of the American and European companies eager to make million-dollar deals—and realized they wouldn’t see a dime of those either. (Iranians are likely to think of those deals when they hear European officials respond to the sight of riot police attacking peaceful protesters with requests that “all concerned” renounce violence.)
“Tell these so-called experts that they need to get a serious education about the anatomy of a revolution,” scoffs one Iranian-American after reading coverage claiming the latest demonstrations in her native land spring strictly from recent economic hardship. “Revolutions always erupt from the discontent of the masses over a period of time and are triggered by a single event. That single event can be a specific crackdown, it may be a price hike on the city buses, you get my point.” Now, it’s “the massive corruption and theft of the nation’s wealth by the ayatollahs and the increasing material support of the international terrorist organizations. People are fed up,” she says. “The trigger for this uprising is the mishandling of the $100 billion that Obama has given the ayatollahs. The chatter on the street ever since has been that that money will never be used for the ills and needs of the society and country, but instead will be used for once again expanding terrorism around the world and for the ayatollahs’ personal private accounts. Which has been the case exactly.” The woman, who left Iran at 16, and her mother live in Washington. They have no affiliation with any opposition group, but they have been glued to Internet footage of the protests, in which thousands have been arrested, for a week.
Shabnam, who lives in Europe, is also in touch with people back home, helping organize further demonstrations as a member of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (also called Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK). “It is true that the protests are based on the economic suffering of the people which has existed for many years under the mullahs’ regime. But because constant hatred for the regime by the people always existed in Iran (due to the human rights violations and denial of basic freedoms), there was always an explosive atmosphere in Iran which was under the ashes. That’s why the uprising quickly became political,” she says. “From my personal experience, I know that the people genuinely understand that the root of all the economic hardships that they have faced is the regime. The people have realized that they will not be able to live normal decent lives and the economic situation will not get better for as long as the mullahs are in power.”
Some people outside, even after watching a week of raucous protests in which demonstrators risk a death-penalty sentence for “insulting” Khamenei, still don’t understand the connection between the economic and the political. The Washington Post reported that “U.S. officials were surprised by the outbreak of the protests and how they have spread.” The newspaper talked to one official who believes “the unrest is different from the protests in 2009 because the latest events are occurring outside Tehran and are fueled by working-class grievances that are economic in nature, not political” and added “that the novelty of the protests is making it difficult for U.S. officials to predict where they will lead.”
The officials should talk to those who knew that the situation in the Islamic Republic was a powder keg ready to blow—the Iranian opposition and the people who took them seriously. “The anti-corruption demonstrations that expanded over the past year were a warning sign that Tehran ignored,” says Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the Washington office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. “What you see now is the accumulation of over three decades of repression and corruption that has now erupted. Dictators always miscalculate, as did the shah.”
Still, “even we are surprised by the pace and scope of the uprising,” says Ali Safavi, also an official with the Washington office of NCRI, which acts as a parliament in exile. “The army of the unemployed, hungry, shantytown and grave dwellers, the futureless youths, and the impoverished, who have been stripped of all their rights and liberties, have now risen up to take back their nation from the corrupt and criminal mullahs.” He predicted, “The day of reckoning is fast approaching.”
Even officials from the Obama administration seem to suspect that could be true—they’re already angling to take credit for any freedom the long-oppressed Iranian people might win for themselves in what could be a long and brutal fight. In a January 4 piece in the Washington Post, Y. J. Fischer, who was assistant coordinator for implementation of the Iran nuclear agreement in Obama’s State Department, declared that “it’s fair to say the protests help illustrate that the Obama administration negotiated a better nuclear deal than many of its critics admit. It shows that critics who said Iran would be empowered by the deal were wrong.”
Kelly Jane Torrance is deputy managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
