For Iran’s rulers, it’s all about hard cash

By Joel Brinkley

The last week was quiet in Iran, comparatively speaking. The government announced it would try 16 people for their roles in last month’s street protests and charge them with “warring against God,” which carries the death penalty.

The head of the Iranian police force warned opponents of the regime that the authorities were now monitoring all e-mails and text messages. Government goons defaced the grave of a student protester who was shot dead by police last year, pockmarking her gravestone with bullet holes. A parliamentary panel accused Tehran’s prosecutor of beating three imprisoned protesters to death.

And the nation’s leaders continued growing filthy rich.

Since the fraudulent elections last June that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, the government has been unstintingly harsh, even deadly, in trying to put down a national uprising. Iran is a theocracy, and the state is charging its opponents with religious crimes. So perhaps spiritual fervor is driving the government to attack its own people. If not that, then maybe it is simply the typical dictator’s determination to hold onto power at any cost.

Important motivators

Certainly those are important motivators. But I would argue that another, little discussed, feature of Iranian society is at least as important to the state’s overlords. They are standing astride a river of cash that flows up to them, non-stop, in one of the most corrupt states in the world. Religion is important, power is wonderful, but how marvelous must it feel to have $1 billion or more in a secret, offshore bank account?

Corruption “is very widespread, and everyone is in on the action, everyone at the top,” said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council under three presidents. “It’s a very, very ugly situation.”

When he ran for the presidency in 1995, 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, number 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 nations surveyed, in the company of Sudan, Chad and Burma.

Once Ahmadinejad won the election, “the whole corruption thing was forgotten,” Sick told me. “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.”

Bribes

Petty exactions at the mailbox and city offices lead inexorably toward multi-million-dollar bribes to government officials from companies that want to start new 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 ... 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.”

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

If the United States wants to do something that would really hurt the Iranian regime and force it to the table to talk about the nuclear program, find those secret offshore bank accounts. Freeze them. Seize them.

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.