October 6, 2024: The United States recently released another $20 billion of Iranian funds to Iran to make a prisoner swap happen. The money is supposed to be used for improving the economic situation of the Iranian people. The U.S. has impounded Iranian assets since the 1979 Iranian revolution that included seizing the Americans Embassy and holding American diplomats hostage. Some Iranian assets were released to get the American hostages released. The initial asset seizure involved over $100 billion in Iranian cash held in nations that were allies of the United States. Since 1979 Iran has been a supporter of groups that attack Israel or Americans interests worldwide. Inside Iran the poverty rate has gone up and popular opposition to the religious dictatorship has increased. The ruling clerics have the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to protect them, even if that includes killing lots of Iranians. The IRGC prefers to kill foreigners that the Iranian government considers enemies and for that the IRGC is identified as an international terrorist organization.

Iran is particularly angry over their inability to inflict any harm on Israel. Iran has used hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles against Israel, to no effect. Israeli air defense systems intercepted all but a few that got through and did little damage. During September 2024 the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon suffered over 40 dead and nearly 4,000 wounded when their pagers and walkie-talkies blew up while they were wearing and using them. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was one of the victims. Israel did not take credit for this operation, but that is standard practice for the Israelis when they pull off some covert attack on Iran. The one time Israel admitted something was in 2016 when Israeli operatives and some Iranian allies stole half a ton of Iran government documents on their nuclear program. The documents were taken out of Iran to Israel where the Israelis allowed foreign experts to examine the material and attest to its authenticity. The Iranian government was furious but the Iranian people were less surprised. Now it was confirmed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, something Iranian officials always denied.

Meanwhile the Americans are reluctant to release more impounded Iranian money to Iranian leaders. Even Iranians don’t trust their leaders to do anything positive with the billions of impounded dollars recently returned. Actually it’s not confirmed that any money has been released. The released money is supposed to be used to benefit the Iranian people, not for military or IRGC operations. Currently Iran is supplying ballistic missiles to Russia for use against Ukrainian targets and continuing to support Hezbollah in Lebanon. The cost of that support just went up because Iran must now pay for the medical treatment thousands of Hezbollah members need after their pagers recently exploded.

Iran's nuclear program has been going on for decades without delivering a usable nuclear weapon. Billions of dollars goes into this program, money that could help revive the Iranian economy. The Iranian people have noted this and are not pleased with this government mismanagement and corruption.

Iranian government misbehavior and malpractice have caused a host of other problems. This includes angering the Persian Gulf Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have turned to Israel as an ally against Iran, which is an increasingly dangerous threat to most everyone in the region.

Iranian foreign policy continues to concentrate on supporting pro-Iran groups in the region. That has become more difficult for Iran-backed Hezbollah, whose political and military leadership has been effectively decapitated by the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile religious leaders in Iran insist that they are meant to lead the Islamic world and gain control over major Islamic shrines in Saudi Arabia. Inside Iran there is increasing unrest from ethnic minorities and anger at the government for things like strict religious policies, including the mandatory hijab law. In 2023 there were protests caused by the death of a young Kurdish woman seized by the lifestyle police and taken to a police station where the woman was beaten to death for not properly covering her hair. This caused more protests in many Iranian cities, which were put down by the IRGC with violence that left hundreds more civilians dead or wounded.

Since 2017 there have been continuing nationwide outbursts against the religious dictatorship running the country. There was similar activity in 2009 to protest the lack of fair elections. The 2009 protests were put down with force as were the recent ones, with over a thousand dead in 2019 and several hundred since then.

What started in late 2017 was different, with the protestors calling for the corrupt religious rulers to be removed. Some called for a return of the constitutional monarchy the religious leaders replaced in 1979 after first promising true democracy. Even more disturbing was protests calling for Islam to be banned and replaced with something else, like Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that Islam replaced, violently and sometimes incompletely in the 7th and 8th centuries. Right before the 2017 unrest the religious rulers saw Iran on the way to some major victories in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. The optimism turned out to be premature. The good times were supposed to begin in the wake of a July 2015 treaty that lifted the many sanctions Iran had collected for bad behavior since the 1990s. That did not, as many financial experts pointed out, solve the immediate cash crises because oil prices were still low. This was because of continued use of fracking in North America which triggered a collapse in prices and income during 2013.

Iran made their situation worse by trying to avoid complying with the 2015 treaty while still getting most of the sanctions lifted and for a while that seemed to be working. That strategy backfired when the U.S. accused Iran of violating the 2015 deal and by the terms of that agreement the American could and did withdraw. That meant many of the sanctions returned in 2018. Even before the American action foreign economists believed the Iranian economy wouldn’t get moving again until the 2020s. Now it is going to take even longer, and most Iranians were extremely very angry about that. As of 2024 Iranians are beginning to despair of ever getting free from their malicious religious dictatorship.