“I am Yahweh. I do not change. I am why Jacob’s descendants are not destroyed.” (Malachi 3: 6)
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The Hill—In Iran’s Water Crisis, Tehran Sows the Seeds of Its Own Decline:
“I have returned” to Iran, tweeted a newly appointed environmental official charged with resolving the country’s water crisis, “with the hope of creating #hope.” Within months, however, that hope evaporated – and he found himself arrested, interrogated, and facing a government-coordinated smear campaign.
Kaveh Madani, a Western-educated Iranian water expert, formally resigned in April in the wake of spurious charges of disloyalty to the Islamist regime. The rise and fall of the deputy head of Iran’s Department of the Environment not only reflects Tehran’s chronic mismanagement of its water resources. Rather, it also mirrors the years-long drought of talent in Iran, which continues to face a spiraling “brain drain” as its citizens flee the regime’s repressive rule.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani first left the country after college, obtaining a master’s degree in water resources from Sweden’s Lund University and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California. He quickly gained a global reputation for his research and expertise. He won prestigious awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the European Geosciences Union. He conducted a TedX talk about global water scarcity. He appeared in Al Jazeera and BBC documentaries. He received a professorship at Imperial College London.
Eventually, his work caught the attention of the Iranian government, which faced a burgeoning, decades-old environmental predicament of its own. Nationwide water shortages, which Madani described as “unprecedented,” had generated widespread social discontent. Key rivers dried up. Millions of Iranians moved from the countryside to cities. Long before nationwide demonstrations began in late December of 2017, protests routinely punctuated affected areas. If the water shortage persists, warned Isa Kalantari, the head of Iran’s Department of the Environment, in a 2015 interview, 50 million Iranians will need to relocate to survive.
Madani placed the lion’s share of culpability on regime mismanagement. “The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic,” he wrote in a 2014 paper. However, he noted, “these exogenous issues are only crisis catalyzers, not the main cause of the water crisis.” Iranians, he argued, “have failed to invest sufficiently into developing a resilient water management system.”
In September 2017, Tehran announced Madani’s appointment as the deputy environment chief. The development constituted an unusual milestone for Iran. First, it represented an implicit, and atypical, acknowledgement by the regime of its own failures — not to mention a willingness to consider the counsel of external critics. Second, it marked the rare return of a prominent Iranian professional from the diaspora, to which millions of Iranians have retreated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
President Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly pledged to reverse the exodus by respecting democratic norms and improving economic opportunity in Iran. And before long, Madani became a symbol of expatriate return, a role he willingly embraced. “There are a lot of people abroad, waiting and watching closely to see what’s going to happen,” he said in December. “If I succeed, we might see more people coming back to help the government.”
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SnyderTalk Comment:
The mullahs in Iran want the world to believe that things are going fine in the Islamic Republic. That’s not true. Things are not going well for Iran, and the situation is getting worse by the day.
It’s their own fault. They operate a brutal, oppressive regime. They sponsor terrorism all over the world. They fight proxy wars in the Middle East aiming at one day ruling the region. And they have vowed to “wipe Israel off the map”. That’s a no-no.
The mullahs have no idea Who they are up against. They don’t realize that their water crisis and their brain drain among other things are reprisals from Yahweh. They brought it on themselves, and the worst is yet to come.
They tried to put a lid on the rise of Christianity in Iran, but they failed miserably. See “Christianity is on the rise in Iran, despite Islamic government’s efforts”. Their self-inflicted crisis opened the door for Yahweh to grow His followers. The mullahs offered the people no hope for a better life, so they turned to the One who can deliver.
See “The return of U.S. sanctions is expected to sow misery in Iran. But for those with money, there’s a haven: dollars”. All the money in the world can’t save a single soul.
Iranian leaders are desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. With the renewal of U.S. sanctions on Iran, things will get a lot worse in a hurry. It’s starting to happen already.
Get ready for the mullahs to strike out with a vengeance. It will be their undoing, but they don’t know that. They will have to learn the hard way.
Keep your eyes on the TRIC nations: Turkey, Russia, Iran, and China. They are moving closer together, and together they will suffer. It will be Yahweh’s doing.
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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)
