12-29-06 What We Don't Know - pt 2

Going all the way back to the era of the Shah in Iran, whose ouster signalized the first big oil shocks in America during the 1970's, what "we didn't know" was that Iran's turnabout into an Islamic theocracy was the beginning of what we don't know today. What we don't know today began to turn into what we're finding out (at least for me) back at the beginning of the month when I posted part one on this subject.

Now the story's beginning to gain a little momentum, and I saw this article published today.

Essentially, the money that has been made from oil exports out of Iran over the past three decades has been used by the Islamic theocratic government for internal social programs. Very little, if any, has been used for the maintenance of oil infrastructure, or the development of new oil infrastucture. The consequence of this mis-spent revenue is that a crisis point has been looming for several years now.

Once this situation is understood, it's easier to comprehend why a country with one of the world's largest oil reserves would ever need nuclear power plants. And once it begins to make sense that they really do need to come up with alternative sources of energy for their country real soon, much of the confusion that surrounds the political ideas about Iran and the political motives of those in power in Iran begins to take on a different shade of meaning.

That government has been using the revenues from oil exports all this time to "pay off" the population, essentially, for its support. As long as the gravy train flows, the population is easy to keep on their side. Now the whole thing has reached a point where the whole thing can very easily collapse within the next decade, the oil revenue flow could collapse, the gravy train "pay off" in social funding could collapse, and the chaos that is inevitable in such a collapse will forever remove power from those in Iran who currently have it.