Stay Prepared to Endure Hardship

It appears that Hassan Rouhani’s view announced during his presidential campaign that centrifuges should continue to spin in Iran only as long as people’s lives continue their course as well is not to the liking of the rulers of the Islamic state. Top Iranian leaders seem to prefer Ahmadinejad’s confrontational posture even though that approach has brought international sanctions and greater economic pains for the ordinary Iranians. In his most recent remarks, Ali Saeedi, the representative of ayatollah Khamenei in the Revolutionary Guards Corps said that “bread” should not be acquired at the expense of just anything, adding that the people of Iran should be ready to endure even more “hardship.”

“Confronting America has a cost; some do not seem to realize this. They say we are here to live.” These are the words of Ali Saeedi as presented at an armed forces seminar on March 15, 2014 in the western town of Ahvaz. Speaking at the gathering, he divided world history into three phases in which the battle between he calls right and void has been going on in practice. The first is the period of the Pharaohs, the second the Abbasi period and the third involves the Islamic republic of Iran. He described this third phase to be between “the will of God” and “the will of the hegemonic powers to prevent the rule of God.” He also views a mission for the Iranian nation who he says must prepare the grounds for the appearance (or reappearance) of the last prophet. “The Iranian nation must pay more attention to its mission in preparing the ground for the appearance of the final imam,” he said.

This influential cleric stressed that “There are challenges and sanctions ahead for the Iranian nation, but we should not give up what we have attained through blood for the sake of obtaining bread. People need to be prepared to suffer hardships.”

In Saeedi’s world, “For the arrival of the last imam, and prior to it, there is a need to have a regime similar to that of the last imam, an example of which undoubtedly exists uniquely in Iran.” He named Hashemi Rafsanjani’s “technocratic” government, Mohammad Khatami’s “reformist” government and the last two years of Ahmadinejad’s administration to be “domestic obstacles” for the appearance of the “imam of the time, adding that the roots of problems in Iran are rooted in businessmen all the way to reformists and thinking like Hashemi.”

“Confronting America face to face has a cost. Some do not realize this and say we are to live our lives. They present the Japanese thesis that says we should not take a confrontational approach towards the powerful. We should walk by them in order to live. We need a government with a strong will to pursue resistance against the powerful,” he said.

The Leader’s Desire for Resistance Economy

“Improving the consumption model,” “double efforts, double work,” “economic jihad,” “national production, support for Iranian labor and capital,” “political epic and economic epic,” etc are the names that ayatollah Khamenei has used to define the calendar years in Iran in the last five years. All of these are essentially economic concepts and from his perspective speak of the period of confrontation of the country with the West. These concepts have picked momentum as international sanctions intensified against Iran. ON sanctions, he has said, “The goal of these sanctions is to cripple the economy. The sanctions are small and insignificant compared to what has been achieved in the country in recent years. Sanctions may have worked thirty years ago when they first launched them against us. The fact that they have increased the sanctions and threaten to strengthen them even more indicates that we have become immune to them. We can confront them in various ways. We can circumvent them, which is a good tactic that the government and people should do and use.”

But it did not take long to crystallize that depending on domestic production and the “good tactic” of circumventing sanctions is not the solution for the country’s economic crisis and its people. Ayatollah Khamenei had looked at the 8-year Iran-Iraq war and had come to the conclusion that the government and people had become impervious to sanctions. But by early 2014 even the country’s Central Bank acknowledged that the price of consumer products had increased four-fold during Ahmadinejad’s administration and had reached 281 percent in the last eight years. The same year, a judiciary court held a trial session for the largest embezzlement case in Iran’s history, while people stood in long lines to buy chicken, in some cases resulted in human deaths. People began to see that international sanctions were not a piece of “torn paper” as Ahmadinejad had famously proclaimed and deceptively assured the Iranian people. These hardening conditions and realities gave birth to politicians and presidential candidates to question the policies of the then-government and speak of changes to improve people’s lives. Saeed Jalili was the only candidate who continued the same approach and sloganeering that Ahmadinejad was pursuing. And he received a little over four million votes, about 20 percent of the electorate. It was at that time that Rouhani said that he wanted to make sure that people’s lives continued their course as the uranium enrichment centrifuges continued their spinning.

But the leader of the Islamic regime continues to favor and promote his notion of resistance economy. He issued specific directives to the heads of the three branches of government about this necessity. In response, the minister of economy issued a directive saying that resistance economy was the “savior” of the economy and the first vice-president issued instructions to all executive agencies requiring that they follow the same concept.

And now as the new Iranian year is approaching on March 21^st, the representative of Iran’s leader heralds the coming of more hardship for the already suffering Iranian nation.