Iran: Drought, incompetence, revolution?

Twenty years of strict sanctions on Iran by both the United States and the United Nations did not bring down the regime of the ayatollahs.

- Gwynne Dyer

Half a dozen major waves of nonviolent protest involving several thousand deaths have not brought it down either. Even last June's massive bombing campaign by Israel and the US did not bring it to heel.

But the lack of water may do what all those other challenges failed to do: destroy the rule of the religious extremists who seized power in Iran in 1979 and have turned the country into an international pariah. The oldest part of every religion is purely transactional, and in Tehran, the imams are praying for rain.

They should pray quite hard, because President Masoud Pezeshkian warned last month that, “There is no water behind the dams. The wells beneath our feet are also running dry.... If it doesn’t rain, we'll have to start rationing water in [November].”

Well, it hasn’t started raining yet, and we are running out of November, so what should people do next? “If the lack of rainfall continues past that, we simply won't have water and will have to evacuate Tehran,’ Mr Pezeshkian said. All ten million people? Where would the government put them, given that the other 80 million Iranians are also suffering from a drought now in its fifth year?