Jeremy Scahill

I mean, remember, Crystal, that when the 1979 Islamic Revolution happened, soon after the Ayatollah came to power, the U.S.

supported Iraq in launching a war against Iran that went on for eight years.

And so Iranians, especially the generation of leaders in Iran right now who grew up fighting that war and living through that war throughout the 1980s, understood what hardship meant, understood what supply shortages meant, understood what an economy that was in a state of deterioration looked like.

I mean, that's why they talk about a resistance economy.

And so we're talking about a period here of weeks, right?

And then using these terms like they're strangling the Iranian economy, I think maybe even three to four months is conservative.

Iran is a massive country of 93 million people.

It's an agricultural society.

It exports goods.

The ways in which the Iranian economy is suffering right now has a lot to do with just cash flow.

And that can certainly have an impact.

And then when you have inflation off the charts, the reason that the protests started in early January were on economic matters.

You know, in American terms, we would say it was small business owners that started saying, like, we can't survive inflation.

You know, in this economy where we have the punishing American sanctions and we have financial mismanagement on the part of our authorities.

And that's what people were saying openly.

And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei actually said that the people need to be listened to on this.

When Moshe Abba Khamenei was named as the supreme leader, he told a story where he had talked about riding sort of in disguise in.

in taxis and listening to ordinary Iranians in the way that they spoke about the country and saying that he considers their voices worth more than opinion polls.

These are interesting statements that are made by the supreme leadership of Iran who are also revered in the Shia Islamic community around the world.

And so I guess the point that I'm making here