Upon his arrival in Iran and appointed in 1979, Iranian first supreme leader and the Islamic Republic founder Ruhollah Khomeini brought with war and enmity for the Iranian people and Iran’s neighbors and other countries of the region. He frequently described the war as a ‘divine blessing’ and affirmed the continuation of the war, saying, ‘war until removing sedition around the world.’
So far, hundreds of thousands of young people in this country have become the victims of the state’s wars. In addition, thousands of citizens of Iran’s neighbors have been burned in the fires of wars waged by proxy groups of the Velayat-e Faqih (supreme religious) rule.
Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen are still burning in the fire of sedition that Iran’s mullahs and their Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) have ignited in these countries. Today, after all these fruitless wars that have wasted only human resources and blood, the voices of those who inevitably come to their senses because they are smelling the end of the theocracy and now they have come to their sense.
The Negative Impact of Proxy Wars on the Economic Situation of the Iranian People
In the July 21 edition of Diplomacy Irani daily, Qasim Mohebba-Ali, former Director-General for the Middle East at the Iranian Foreign Ministry criticized Tehran’s forty-year-old foreign policy with a focus on increasing tensions with neighbors. He also affirmed that the people have paid a heavy price for it.
“At present, the cost of this type of foreign policy in Tehran is borne by the people with the focus on increasing tensions with neighbors. If you look at the situation of the foreign exchange, coin, housing, car, rent, and even consumer goods markets in the country, you will see that part of these challenges is due to our severely wrong view of foreign policy in the region and the world,” he added.
Mohebba-Ali also enumerated the harmful economic consequences for the Iranian people and warned the leaders over the anger of the people and their protests at any moment.
“Now the heavy price of this kind of forty years of wrong politics and diplomacy in the region and the world is being paid by the people with all their flesh and blood, and their entire existence. Therefore, with the increase of economic and livelihood problems inside, pursuing our wrong diplomacy will definitely not be as safe and riskless as in the past. Because at any moment, it is possible to see a massive protest inside the country by breaking the threshold of people’s tolerance for economic problems,” Mohebba-Ali concluded.
On May 20, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, former chair of the Parliament (Majlis) National Security and Foreign Affairs Commission, revealed parts of Iran’s heavy expenditure in Syria. He complained about the management of the wars and the interventions of the government in the region, pointing to a part of the costs of these unbridled development demands and said:
“We gave maybe $20-30 billion to Syria and we have to get it back from Syria. The money of this nation has been spent there.”
Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said on the TV program ’14th Century’ on September 27, that according to the official report of the Iran Program and Budget Organization prepared at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iran has spent ‘$19.6 billion’ on this war.
It should be noted that Rahim Safavi, Khamenei’s military adviser in 2017, had said that in the eight-year war, Iran ‘spent a maximum of 12 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the war.’
This share of GDP amounts to more than $21 billion annually and reaches $173 billion during the total war years, which is several times more than Fadavi’s claims. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani repeatedly claimed that the damage from the war with Iraq is estimated at more than $1,000 billion. But if we take into account the calculations of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which was prepared in 1991, we again reach the figure of $97 billion of war damages for the Iranian people.
Another area of wasting the wealth of the Iranian people is in terror acts. Like the latest decision by a U.S. judge, who has ordered Iran to pay $1.45 billion to the family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who is presumed to have died in the custody of this government.
Or the order of the federal judge in Washington on September 10, 2018, which ordered Iran to pay $104.7 million to victims of a June 1996 truck bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. military personnel, as Reuters reported at that time. Examples of such decisions to compensate for the damages because of the ayatollahs’ terror acts are many.
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