Even without that factor, Attention does matter. Governments can do multiple things, but in more dictatorial regimes, doing things well often require prioritization at the top, and there is a limited number of things the top can prioritize. Its one of the main failings of dictatorships in general: the top is afraid to appoint too competent middle management lest they rise up, so everything becomes very top down managed.
Additionally some of the issues causing this seem to be related to corruption in their military, like diverting water in unsustainable ways to support farming projects that have ties to people well connected to irgc. (To be fair, i dont know how true that is, i dont have a good source for that)
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
Anyways my point was not really about hurricane.
They could just stop being at war with Israel any time, it is a pointless choice.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
From inflicting war on everyone (from before its inception in 48, to now) for lebensraum (greater israel),
to the kind of apartheid that old Afrikaners couldn't even dream about (as attested to Nelson Mandela & Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knew a thing or two about SA apartheid),
all the way to outright Holocaust in a full blown extermination camp (Gaza).
There's nothing left to argue. Iran, for all its faults, is one of the few entities which is standing against that. And for that, the past vilified them, the present damn them, but the future will applaud them.
Gaza is an extermination camp? The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment. Do you think the Nazi extermination camps were like that?
What's disgusting is the behavior of Israelis that makes the vast majority of people credibly compare them to nazis. There is an ongoing ICJ trial about whether they are committing a genocide, and most of the international genocide scholars (including jewish and israeli scholars) have given their affirmative opinion on that.
The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
In the meantime i hope it rains.
It's sad to such a great people subjugated by their government.
1: https://www.cfr.org/article/irans-regional-armed-network 2: https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/proxy-wars/map
It is a crying shame and the Iranians deserve better. At the moment 16 million people may find themselves without water in the near future. I'm lost for words.
If one positive thing could be found in this situation it might finally be the thing that brings down the regime. I think it's fair to say this year has been an annus horribilis for them.
It's an Islamic theocracy with nuclear as well as regional hegemonic ambitions; what about the corresponding impoverishment of its citizens is "baffling" to you?
Maybe Tehran just needs to tax the locals an additional 2% so they can finally start delivering…
They are delivering on the free water promise by setting Qty=0.
to put this in perspective, 13M people fled during the Syrian Civil War. 5.7M people fled Ukraine. The evacuation of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina was 1.2M people.
Nearby Israel has desalination plants that seem to be working out well.
This situation was avoidable but it required investment years ago. Kind of too late now.
Then, desalination requires energy, and Iran already faces blackouts here and there, there just isn't much spare capacity.
Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.
Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latyan_Dam https://maps.app.goo.gl/UzQrPMR4iHRdbsuP7
Edit: TIL there can be different translations/spellings of Persian to English
It's a pity that geopolitics -- specifically, Iran's desire to eliminate Israel -- is the reason why we couldn't test this out.