The Reuters news agency last week made an informal and unscientific survey of public opinion on the streets and found little concern about a military attack but much trepidation about the impact of increasing Western sanctions.
“What I’m worrying about is more sanctions on airlines,” Nahal, a 26-year-old office manager in Tehran, told Reuters.
A US ban on the sale of planes and aircraft parts is one of the more talked-about of the sanctions Iran faces, at least by upper class Iranians. They say it has unfairly hit civilians by contributing to air crashes and a general fear about airline safety.
The plane and parts ban, however, has been in effect for a third of a century and actually has little impact. Iran has obviously been able to get spare parts for its Boeings on the international market or it would have been forced to ground them in the 1980s. But the government feeds the theory that planes crash because of US sanctions, thus promoting the idea that the Americans are heartless fiends.
The overall impact of sanctions is hard to judge, but Iranians say they think sanctions are affecting them. Some blame hostile foreign powers like the US, but others blame their own government for pursuing a politics of hostility that encourages other countries to impose sanctions.
The United Nations has imposed four rounds of sanctions on Iran due to nuclear concerns since 2006, targeting individuals and companies linked to the nuclear program. Those UN sanctions are fairly limited and many of them are little more than cosmetic.
The United States, the European Union and several other countries, including Canada, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea and Australia, have imposed tougher unilateral measures that have had a more direct impact on the economy, including a ban on most financial transactions with Iran that has complicated international trade.
The most effective sanctions have probably been the US restrictions on banking transactions with Iran, which have forced Iranian traders to take all sorts of economic alleyways to transact business. This has added more than a quarter to costs, according to many importers.
But there are no direct sanctions on Iran’s oil and, with crude prices above $100 per barrel, a level Tehran says is “comfortable,” foreign exchange continues to flood into the coffers of world’s fifth biggest oil exporter, enabling Iran to import all manner of consumer goods.
US officials have often said that sanctions are aimed at proliferators and not at the general public. That was certainly true in past years when the main sanctions were those aimed at keeping hi-tech items that could be used in missiles and nuclear weapons from reaching Iran. But with the expansion of sanctions to throttle general banking transactions, that can longer be considered true.
Iranian supermarkets may lack the glossy sheen of those in the West, but most products—from breakfast cereals to cosmetics—are available. Only steadily rising inflation—not empty shelves—hint that all is not well in the economy, Reuters said.
A report issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in August said sanctions had “increased the cost of doing business, limited FDI [foreign direct investment] and technology transfer and have affected international trade and financial transactions.”
Economists say the financial sanctions will have added to price pressures as inflation has risen from single figures to 19 percent in less than a year. But a far more important factor has been President Ahmadi-nejad’s policy of slashing subsidies on essentials like food and fuel.
The government has insisted for years that sanctions have actually been beneficial, by pushing domestic companies to be more self-reliant. To a certain extent, that is undoubtedly true. But Iranian companies have also been cut off from many technological breakthroughs, and some appear to have taken advantage of the greater costs of imports to inflict shoddy products on Iranian buyers.