Angry in the Great White North

Sometimes in life, problems take care of themselves.

Is Iran one of those problems? Perhaps:

Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published Monday in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.

Iran earns about $50-billion (U.S.) a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 per cent annually. In less than five years exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Mr. Stern predicted.

I don't think it will take until 2015.

Remember that it might not be possible to run the Iranian oil industry below a certain level of profit. In others words, the study says that at 10% decline annually, in 10 years it'll be gone. It might not take that long. It might be that at 30%, for example, the fixed nonelastic costs to run the oil industry can no longer be covered, and it collapses.

But it won't take that long, either. At some point before the collapse, government officials will realize that the situation cannot be turned around. When that realization happens, they will either take what money is left and leave the coutry, or they'll lash out.

Or maybe they'll reach out.

That's what some people are hoping for:

If the United States can “hold its breath” for a few years it may find Iran a much more conciliatory country, he said. And that, Mr. Stern said, is good reason to belay any instinct to take on Iran militarily.

“What they are doing to themselves is much worse than anything we could do,” he said.

“The one thing that would unite the country right now is to bomb them,” Mr. Stern said. “Here is one problem that might solve itself.”

I noticed no one has pointed out the obvious. It might well be that the moment has already passed. What if the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran, obviously working with better information, came to this conclusion some time ago? Maybe they began the nuclear weapons program as early as they did precisely because they knew they had only so much time to complete it. And they knew that the weapons that resulted would serve as poor deterrents because in a few years, Iran would collapse economically. There would be nothing to deter because Iran would cease to exist.

If that's the case, the Iran government never intended to reach out, or to abandon the Iranian people to economic disaster, but to use the last years and the dwindling resources remaining to build a bomb that would have only use -- to be used.

I hope I'm wrong.