Witness

So now that several months have passed since the rigged election, Ahmadinejad is reportedly looking for ways to regain his legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people.

No, really, he is. Stop laughing!

More oil refineries, he says, so that by 2012 Iran won’t have to import gasoline! More competent technocrats and fewer clerics will advise him! Full speed ahead on civilian nuclear power!

I imagine he’s thinking—well, the Chinese manage to balance economic development with political oppression pretty well. Why can’t Iran?

The answer to that is actually pretty simple—because China isn’t controlled by a bunch of paramilitary thugs who take every opportunity to pad their own pockets and leech productivity from the system at the expense of the general population. I’m referring, of course, of the Revolutionary Guard.

The Guard runs airports and banks and shopping centers and insurance companies and oil companies and civil engineering firms and…you know what I'm talking about. The problem is, they don’t run these things well. In a normal country, if a business is mismanaged and losing money, it fails. In Iran, if it’s run by the Revolutionary Guard, it survives on subsidies from the government. Or, put another way, it survives by stealing money from the people of Iran. The Guard also steals through their connections to the Bonyads, the enormous unregulated tax-exempt charitable foundations that act as business conglomerates and account for an estimated twenty percent of the Iranian economy. 

In order for Ahmadinejad, and by extension Khamenei, to regain any sense of legitimacy the way the Chinese government arguably has, the Iranian government would need to start investing more in the their people than they do in the Revolutionary Guard.

And that’s not going to happen. The Revolutionary Guard didn’t steal the election just to watch their big crime syndicate get shut down. They stole it so they could continue to loot Iran.

So Ahmadinejad can talk all he wants about economic and scientific development. As long the Revolutionary Guard continues to loot the country at the expense of the people and the broader economy, no government run by him or Khamenei or anyone else in Iran will be perceived as legitimate.