When someone is blinded by hate, he develops the tendency to
stack one mistake on top of the other, thus builds a monument of errors which
he then uses as a guide to foretell the future. Based on shaky predictions of
this kind, he constructs strategies that, needless to say, turn out to be
useless if not damaging to the causes he set out to promote in the first place.
That's what comes out from reading the article that was
written by Reuel Marc Gerecht under the title: “History Contradicts the Dream
of Iranian Moderation” and the subtitle: “Repression lifted slightly in the
1990s but the economy did not, and state-sponsored terrorism abroad continued.”
It was published in the Wall Street Journal on April 1, 2015.
Gerecht joins the debate relating to the recently negotiated
Iran
nuclear deal, on the side of those who oppose it. And so, he sets out to
demonstrate that those who agree with it are making a mistake. To do this, he
uses the economic argument and starts out by harking back to a time when Iran was
demographically, economically and politically in a different place from where
it is today.
His point is that the leaders of Iran mismanaged the economy in the
1990s, and will not do better this time even though the sanctions will be lifted;
the country will immediately get an infusion of cash, and will see a flood of
foreign investments pour in. So you look forward to a discussion that's really
an economic discussion, but regrettably find nothing of the sort. Instead, you
encounter this: “President Rafsanjani produced little economic dynamism. Enterprise in Iran is corrupt, nepotistic,
constrained and usually guided as much by politics as profit … As a result,
when capital flowed into the country the ruling elite got richer, but average
Iranians did not.”
This said, Gerecht asks: “How will so-called moderation this
time around, led by President Rouhani, be any different?” And he answers: “If
anything, life in Iran
after the nuclear accord is likely to become more harsh and politically
convulsive.” Here too, he fails to advance a discussion that is really an
economic discussion. And here too, you encounter a set of propositions that
mean nothing. Here is a sample: “Lifting sanctions will release a windfall certain
to unleash the appetites of the clerics and the technocrats. We will see a
feeding frenzy.”
Having made a non-economic economic argument, Reuel Marc
Gerecht builds on top of it a layer of wisdom, and on top of that a layer of
predictions. His wisdom goes like this: “Failed expectations are always
dangerous, and Mr. Rouhani has oversold what the nuclear deal will do
economically for the average Iranian.” As to his predictions, they go like
this: “The lower and middle classes in the cities could begin to find common
ground with the college educated.”
To argue that the Iranians have no hope of escaping the fate
he has imagined for them, Gerecht throws in this comment: “Iran will need
to generate more money than it has since 1979 to have any chance of improving
the lot of unconnected Iranians … The Iranian president believes he's
negotiated a deal in which he can have it all. But the cash infusion will only
stress the fault lines of Iranian society.” He sees no break for these people.
But really, what's wrong with any of that? What's wrong is
that the author did not consider for a minute the saying: “Necessity is the
mother of invention.” living under a brutal regime of sanctions, the Iranians
found themselves in need of things they used to take for granted, but were no
longer available to them. And so, they invented their way out of their
predicament. In this case, 'invent' does not mean re-invent the wheel, for
example. It means reconfigure the economy to locally produce the necessities of
life before anything else, and produce them with maximum efficiency. All those
who suffered sanctions of one form or another – Egypt included – did just that, and
came out of the experience better off than when they entered it.
Secure in the knowledge that they have the wherewithal to
produce what is necessary to sustain life, the Iranians will consider what will
accrue to them when the sanctions are lifted to be surplus that can go into
investment projects whose result will improve the lives of the citizens without
asking them to sacrifice anything in return. And those of us who studied these
things, know that surplus has always been the fuel that powered the engine of
industrial and political progress. Expect nothing less than that to happen in Iran .