“While the Iranian economy struggles to adjust to periodic US sanctions “upgrades,” a significantly devalued currency and restrictions in global financial transactions have suddenly challenged even Iran’s famed adaptability to these kinds of externally-imposed pressures. But something is awry. There is no implosion in Iran. How is that possible with off-the-chart hikes in the price of basic goods, unaffordable housing in congested urban areas, increased youth unemployment? Instead, Iranians who love nothing better than to complain about government and economy, have grumpily rallied against these foreign efforts to pit population against state. According to results of a Gallup poll in February, 85 percent of Iranians claim sanctions have hurt their livelihood……….. But the fact is that sanctions simply don’t work: Iran is not going to stop its nuclear enrichment. Iranians aren’t going to eject their government.……….”
The source article of this above quote (from S. Narwani) is more to the point: the sanctions are NOT working as presumably intended. Iranians, or most of them, having allowed Western plotting and money to overthrow an earlier independent elected government (Mossadeq: Operation Ajax in 1953), are unlikely to cooperate again, even under duress.
An intriguing question, or is it a case study, about Iran. It implicitly poses important questions that may explain this continuous monthly ratcheting-up of the Western blockade. So how is it that besieged Iran, with so-called alleged claimed screamed daily bull-horned on-the-verge-of-collapse under the tightest blockade in modern history, how is it that it can defy the Israeli-manipulated Western blockade? Not only that: how is it that it can defeat the combined worldwide efforts of the United States, the European Union, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the sectarian tribal despots of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the UAE? How can a country, a society, allegedly on the verge of collapse and capitulation and crying uncle to the U.S. Congress and AIPAC and an expectantly triumphant Western mainstream media, how can it defy these odds?
How is it that a society under the tightest economic and technological blockade can bring down sophisticated foreign drones, send out its own domestic drones, advance in space and nuclear research and bio-sciences, counter-hack computer systems, run elections (albeit not ideal completely free elections) and wage proxy wars even as it prepares for a massive foreign attack against it that is threatened almost daily by Mr. Netanyahu, the US Congress, Britain’s Cameron, even France’s Hollande, not to mention the funny shaikhs of Bahrain?
Is there something we can’t see? Is there a degree of internal decay and deterioration that we can’t see that points to the imminent Iranian collapse that Mr. Obama’s advisers have been promising him in private? Ich Weiss nicht, aber I think not. Are they, under political pressure, foolishly underestimating the foe? It won’t be the first time.
Cheers
mhg