Israel Matzav: Ahmadinejad's Iran, corruption and repression

Ahmadinejad's Iran, corruption and repression

Barack Hussein Obama is not the only world leader who promised clean government and promptly went and did the opposite. So did his alter ego, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran is a huge cleptocracy.

When he ran for the presidency in 2005, Ahmadinejad promised to end corruption and clean up the nation's economy. That was why people voted for him. The Associated Press interviewed voters at the polls on election day, and most of them said something like Mahdi Mirmalek's remark: "I will vote for Ahmadinejad because he is the one committed to fighting corruption."

Well, that year, Transparency International placed Iran just past halfway down its Corruption Perceptions Index, No. 88 of 158 countries surveyed. By 2007, Iran had fallen to 131st place. This year, in the survey just published, Iran is pushing toward the bottom: 168th out of 180 nation's surveyed, in the company of Sudan, Chad and Burma.

Once Ahmadinejad won the election, "the whole corruption thing was forgotten," Sick said. "He didn't even pay it lip service anymore."

Now the problem runs from the bottom of society all the way up.

"You have to bribe the postman to get your mail delivered," said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. "It's pandemic, and, now, normalized."

Petty exactions at the mailbox and city offices lead inexorably toward multimillion-dollar bribes to government officials from companies that want to start businesses. It's normalized, as Milani said. The businessmen have the direct-wire addresses to move the money into the officials' offshore accounts. Given the wealth that washes through the economy from the oil business - Iran is the world's fourth largest oil producing nation - the amount of money passed in some bribes is larger than the annual budgets of mid-size Iranian cities.

As so often happens in corrupt societies, Iran's leaders profess to be clean and distressed about the graft. Don't believe it. As Milani puts it: "You can't rule a bureaucracy where everyone who works for you is corrupt - and you are clean."

Reporting from Iran shows that the children of both Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, are set up with positions that tie them directly into the money flow so that they are quite wealthy. Are their fathers going to watch their children get rich while they live a pious life on a government salary? Unlikely.

When discussion of the problem does come up, of course the regime blames Washington.

What I don't get is why, in light of this, so many people fear that if the West institutes real biting sanctions against Iran it's going to rally the people around Ahmadinejad and his junta. I'm going to guess that most Iranians would gladly give just about anything for regime change. Including their nuclear program.

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Israel Matzav: Ahmadinejad's Iran, corruption and repression