Iran’s Water Crisis Threatens to Topple Decades-Old Regime

By Gwynne Dyer

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. Half a dozen major waves of non-violent protest, involving several thousand deaths, haven’t brought it down either. Even last June’s massive bombing campaign by Israel and the United States didn’t 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,” Pezeshkian said. All 10 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?

Nobody knows. If Pezeshkian sounds well-intentioned but hopeless and basically useless, that’s because he’s not really the government. For the past 45 years, all the big decisions in Iran have been made not by the elected parliament but by the unelected “supreme leader,” a role that’s been filled since 1989 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ayatollahs are the supreme religious authorities in the Twelver strand of Shia Islam that prevails in Iran and Iraq. They are not necessarily secular leaders, but in the turbulent aftermath of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the monarchy, an ayatollah named Ruhollah Khomeini sought and gained absolute power in Iran.

Khomeini lasted only 10 more years, but his designated successor, Khamenei, is still in office 36 years later at the age of 86. As one would expect, he heads a regime that sees matters of faith and morals — like ensuring that women’s hair is properly concealed — as more important than material concerns like looking after the water supply.

This general neglect of practical matters also opened the door to widespread corruption among those in charge of the economy, which partly explains why Iran’s GDP per capita is still stuck at about the same level as it was in 1985. The other reason is the sheer incompetence of even those officials who don’t take bribes.

Now add an unprecedented multi-year drought that is hitting city dwellers as well as rural people. Rainfall was down by almost half in last year’s rainy season, so there was very little water left behind the dams when the winter rains failed to arrive in late October this year.

The great unspoken fear among Iranians who are paying attention is that this may not be just wayward weather. It could be the leading edge of permanent climate change. Five years is a long time for a random deviation from the norm.

In the shorter run, however, it could be the trigger for an uprising that finally dispatches a regime that has overstayed its welcome. All the other challenges over the years could be blamed on wicked and godless foreigners stirring up impressionable locals, but this problem is entirely home-grown. No excuses available.

There are no reliable opinion polls in Iran, but the best guess is that after 45 years, at least half the population dislikes the regime while most others simply accept it as inevitable. If the rain doesn’t come soon, and especially if the government starts evacuating cities, a decisive shift in public opinion is entirely possible.