Fifty percent of the Iranian population struggled to find food or shelter at some point in the last twelve months and nearly half of all Iranians blame the United States, a recent Gallup poll finds.
The numbers were the highest among all nineteen Middle Eastern and North African nations polled over the last two years, indicating the severe economic distress wracking the Islamic republic.
They may also indicate that U.S. and international sanctions are missing their mark, falling on vulnerable Iranian families while doing little to prevent the Islamic republic’s burgeoning nuclear program.
“People have much less disposable income, their currency is worth about a fifth of what it was just a couple of years ago and inflation is terrible,” Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert at The Atlantic Council, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“It’s really difficult for working class people, and even some middle class people are now slipping into poverty because of the high prices for things and increasing unemployment,” she said.
The poll reveals that 27 percent of Iranians in the workforce are now unemployed, with a further 34 percent underemployed. Thirty-four percent also complain that their standard of living is declining, up from 20 percent two years earlier.
Forty-six percent of Iranians hold the United States responsible, with only 13 percent blaming their own government.
“No doubt Iran has its own economic problems, but sanctions would also have an enormous impact,” Doug Bandow, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, told TheDC News Foundation.
“When you put sanctions on a country, they typically affect common people much more than they affect governments or the elites,” he continued.
Slavin agreed, noting that broad sanctions targeting vast swathes of the Iranian economy “impoverish and embitter ordinary Iranians.”
But Michael Rubin, a Mideast scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, believes the sanctions’ effects are overrated.
“What’s done the most harm to Iranians isn’t the sanctions, it’s their own mismanagement of the economy,” he said in an interview with TheDC News Foundation.
Pointing to a 31 percent inflation rate in Iranian food prices, Rubin noted that while sanctions would greatly impact any imported products, “aside from bananas, Iranians tend not to import all their food. This is Iran’s own domestic production and it’s not affected by sanctions.”
Rubin believes that the Islamic republic’s economic woes are part of a long-term pattern brought about by government control over vast portions of the Iranian economy.
“The Iranian government has always tried to blame their economic misfortune on outsiders, but traditionally the Iranians have blamed their own government for that,” Rubin said.
He believes that the poll is reflective of a public relations war now raging between Iran and the United States.
“If Iranians are starting to blame the United States, that’s indicative that Americans are losing the information battle. Perhaps U.S. Persian-language media should concentrate a little bit more on informing the Iranians of the reality of the situation rather than beaming Justin Bieber music into the Islamic republic,” he said.
But regardless of the sanctions’ impact on the average Iranian, many doubt that they will be able to meaningfully halt or delay the Iranian government’s nuclear weapon and missile programs.
Even Dick Cheney, the former vice president, once questioned how efficient Iranian sanctions really were. “Our government is sanctions-happy,” The New York Times quotes him saying in 1999, “[but] unilateral sanctions almost never work.”
Today’s experts echo that opinion.
“Congress has never met a sanction against Iran that it didn’t like,” said Slavin. “They need to understand that the sanctions have reached a point where there are diminishing returns in terms of our ability to influence the government and our ability to retain the goodwill of the Iranian people.”
Bandow agreed. “I have talked to people years ago in former Yugoslavia that said sanctions made it harder for them to organize against the government and that officials used sanctions for their own good,” he said.
If the United States’ goals are to halt progress on Iranian weapon programs by weakening or overthrowing the regime, “I am skeptical that sanctions are going to get us there,” he concluded.
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