OP-ED: “Iran’s Economic Crisis: President Ahmadinejad isn’t bringing the oil money ‘to every dinner table,’” by Amir Taheri, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2007, p. A17.

This piece shows why Friedman's Petropolitics law has rather short legs, historically speaking. Demography, among other things, can quickly overwhelm its explanatory power. Condi’s got to do more, as does the USG in general, to bypass the leadership and get the economic connectivity flowing below. As this article indicates, Iran is dying on the vine because its current economic connectivity is so narrowly focused on oil and Ahmadinejad is preaching and practicing some stupid version of economic autarky a la Kim’s juche in the DPRK. The big difference, of course, is that some real connectivity exists, thanks to the oil and gas. Instead of asking India and China to boycott Iran alongside us, which will never work, we need to be working with them on how their economic infiltration can open up Iran. This is a country ripe for the economic taking, but as is so often the case, we focus on killing weeds instead of growing some lawn. Détente is all about the latter, isolation and containment all about the former. Killing weeds has its time and place, but that time and place isn’t with Iran right now, not with our current mess/tie-down in Iraq. No, not when Iran’s this weak. That sequencing has been one of our own choosing, but Bush and company refuse to live by their choices. Excellent piece by Taheri, who is superb on Iran.