The New York Times reported earlier this week about protests against the Iranian government.
The Iranian government declared a sudden, two-day national holiday on Sunday and Monday, after a long-simmering dispute between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Tehran bazaar erupted last week, leaving one prominent merchant dead, according to opposition Web sites.
Shopkeepers in Tehran’s traditional bazaar district called a strike last Tuesday to protest what was rumored to be a planned 70 percent rise in income taxes. The government denied the rumors, calling them a misunderstanding that resulted from a “mistake†in the way the plan was presented.
But a prominent textile trader was killed when pro-government militiamen and police officers raided the bazaar on Wednesday, demanding that shopkeepers reopen for business, opposition Web sites reported. One member of the textile merchant’s guild was said to have been arrested on Wednesday after addressing a crowd and calling for the strike to continue.
This is not the first time that the government of Iran has a afoul of the business class.
Now it appears that discontent has spread. The Times is now reporting:
Web sites reported that the bazaar in Isfahan was closed Thursday. In the northwestern city of Tabriz, the bazaar had been closed since Tuesday, a merchant said, and vendors said they would continue their strike to force the provincial authorities to retreat from the tax increase even if an agreement were reached in Tehran.
The traditional bazaars, a major economic institution in Iran, supported the 1979 revolution and have backed the Islamic government. Influential merchants are largely members of the conservative Islamic Coalition Party and have stood behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But as Iran’s economic fortunes have sagged in recent years, Mr. Ahmadinejad has looked increasingly to the bazaar for new revenues. The strike and the senior merchants’ reluctance to intervene to end it are widely seen as signs of the bazaar’s increasing disenchantment with the president and his administration.
With everyone wondering about the possibility of an armed attack on Iran, not everyone’s paying attention to the forces inside the country that may be pressuring the government.
Additionally, there may be another external effort afoot going on to undermine the government.
Then, there was the odd case of the Tinners, a Swiss family of engineers long believed to be a cog in the network of nuclear proliferators organized by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. In 2008, Urs Tinner admitted that he had been a CIA asset. And it turns out that he may have played a crucial role in an effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. According to The New York Times and other sources, the Tinners sold high-quality vacuum pumps to the Iranians and Libyans. The pumps are crucial for uranium enrichment because centrifuges must operate inside a vacuum seal. David Albright–the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and the author of a new history of Iran’s illicit procurement of nuclear technology, Peddling Peril — explains that, while the pumps that ended up in Iran and Libya were produced in Germany, they were also worked on by the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos laboratories. These labs, he says, modified the pumps “to bug them or to make them break down under operational conditions. If you can break the vacuum in a centrifuge cascade, you can destroy hundreds of centrifuges or thousands if you are really lucky.” (A senior intelligence official confirmed Albright’s information to me. It should be noted that not everyone agrees that the Tinners were the ones who sold these pumps to the Iranians and Libyans; Albright, for one, isn’t sure.)
Sometimes, these operations do not end well. Ali Ashtari, a high-tech electronics vendor, was hung by Iran in 2008 after he confessed to bugging the equipment of senior Revolutionary Guard figures with viruses and GPS units provided to him by Israel. Ronen Bergman, the top intelligence reporter for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, believes that Ashtari was an “example of how someone–the Iranians claim it’s the Israeli Mossad — tried to sabotage the Iranian nuclear project by covert means, rather than an air strike.” Adds Bergman, “Ashtari was executed, but other entities continue to sabotage the project.”
But do sabotage efforts work? In late 2008 and early 2009, the IAEA began to see a drop in the amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) being produced at Natanz, the facility that lies at the centre of Iran’s known nuclear weapons program. In the fall of 2008, its centrifuges were producing 90 kilograms a month of LEU. By the end of the year, however, the same centrifuges were producing 70 kilograms of LEU. To be sure, that number was back up to 85 kilograms per month at the close of 2009, and it has been climbing since, to around 120 kilograms a month; but those increases came after the installation of more centrifuges — all of which suggests that at least some of the machines were less efficient than they should be. (Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear scientist and the vice president of the strategic security program at the Federation of American Scientists, estimated in a study this year that the centrifuges are operating at 20% efficiency.)
It would be ironic – though apparently not likely – if the Iranian efforts to obtain nuclear weapons would be foiled by means other than military force.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
