A red line and a reeling rial

SIX YEARS ago, when America and Europe were putting in place the first raft of measures to press Iran to come clean over its nuclear ambitions, the talk was of “smart” sanctions. The West, it was stressed, had no quarrel with the Iranian people—only with a regime that seemed bent on getting a nuclear bomb, or at least the capacity for making one. Yet, as sanctions have become increasingly punitive in the face of Iran’s intransigence, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price.

On October 1st and 2nd Iran’s rial lost more than 25% of its value against the dollar. Since the end of last year it has depreciated by over 80%, most of that in just the past month. Despite subsidies intended to help the poor, prices for staples, such as milk, bread, rice, yogurt and vegetables, have at least doubled since the beginning of the year. Chicken has become so scarce that when scant supplies become available they prompt riots. On October 3rd police in Tehran fired tear-gas at people demonstrating over the rial’s collapse. The city’s main bazaar closed because of the impossibility of quoting accurate prices.

Last month a petition with 10,000 names on it was presented to the country’s labour minister by trade unionists. It was a cry of pain. One passage read: “A staggering increase in prices has been biting in the past year, as worker’s wages in the same period have gone up by only 13%.” Unemployment is thought to be around three times higher than the official rate of 12%, and millions of unskilled factory workers are on wages well below the official poverty line of 10m rials (about $300) a month.

Though the economic and financial mismanagement of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government and chronic infighting within the regime have contributed to the economic chaos, the speed of the recent deterioration is also due to the ratcheting up of sanctions on Iran’s vital energy sector, which provides about 80% of export revenues. An oil embargo imposed by the European Union in July and other measures that have included cutting Iran off from international financial-settlement mechanisms and maritime insurance are hurting hard.

Even before the rial’s latest dive, Israel’s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, said on September 30th that Iran’s government would lose $45 billion to $50 billion in oil revenues by the end of the year because of the sanctions. Iran’s economy, Mr Steinitz surmised, was “on the verge of collapse”.

Still, it may be too soon to say whether the sanctions will persuade Iran to curb its nuclear programme or allow outside monitors to verify that it is for peaceful purposes only, as it has always contended. The Iranian regime may not even yet know how it will react. Talks earlier this year between Iran and the UN Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany, the P5+1, quickly got bogged down.

At times, Mr Ahmadinejad has sounded as if he would quite like a deal that would alleviate Iran’s economic misery. But he is on his way out; after two terms, he cannot stand in next year’s presidential election; besides, many of his friends may be squeezed out at the same time. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who calls the final shots on such big issues as the nuclear one, still talks blithely of a “resistance economy” that has lessened its dependence on oil.

Chief among the sanctions sceptics is Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He says that, whatever the economic cost, Iran will not be deflected from its ambition to get a nuclear weapon and is likely to be stopped only by military action. In a bravura performance at the UN’s General Assembly on September 27th, aimed at winning international support for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, he pulled out a picture of a cartoonish bomb intended to show how close the Islamic Republic is to being able to build the real thing.

With a further flourish, he took out a red pen and drew a line near the bomb’s neck. That, Mr Netanyahu said, represented the point when Iran would have sufficient 20%-enriched uranium to produce enough of the weapons-grade variety needed for a nuclear warhead. Sanctions, he pointed out, had done nothing to slow the pace of Iran’s enrichment programme. On the basis of inspectors’ reports by the UN’s own nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he forecast that Iran would get there by the spring or early summer of next year. When it did, it should be held to have crossed a red line that would trigger a military response, not just on Israel’s part, but, by implication, on America’s too.

But for all the speech’s almost Messianic tone it was greeted with a degree of relief by officials in Barack Obama’s administration. For some time there have been worries that Mr Netanyahu might exploit the circumstances afforded by the final stages of the presidential election campaign to launch an attack in the hope of forcing America’s hand. With the prospects of Mitt Romney (an old chum of Mr Netanyahu who seems joined at the hip with him over Iran) apparently fading, those concerns had increased to the extent that the Israeli prime minister had been warned repeatedly that if he did issue an order to attack, he would be on his own. The disagreement was less over allowing Iran to get a bomb—Mr Obama says he will do whatever is necessary to stop it—and more over where that red line should be drawn.

Mr Netanyahu, with the support of Mr Romney and many Republicans, insists that the issue is one of capability, narrowly defined by Iran’s stock of 20%-enriched uranium. Mr Obama, by contrast, puts greater stress on Iran taking the final, essentially political, step to acquiring a device by bringing together all its technological components. That means sufficient highly enriched uranium; the machining of it into metal to form a warhead small enough to fit into a missile nose cone; a trigger mechanism to initiate the atomic explosion at the precise moment of missile re-entry; and a reliable ballistic missile system to carry the warhead to its target.

Would one bomb be enough?

The Americans also doubt whether Iran would attempt to dash for a bomb with enough uranium for just one device rather than at least three or four, which would require at least another year to produce beyond Mr Netanyahu’s time frame.

Consequently, the Americans are looking at a range of possible signals to gauge whether Iran has decided to cross the red line that matters most. Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert on weapons proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, says there are at least three which should be seen as game-changers. The first would be if Iran expelled the IAEA’s inspectors and left the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

A second would be if those inspectors found that Iran was enriching beyond the 20% level; it might say that it needed to do so to manufacture medical isotopes or to fuel submarines, but those claims would be met with intense suspicion.

A third would be if Western intelligence services uncovered evidence that Iran had resumed the structural work on weaponisation that it suspended in 2003. After the Iraq WMD fiasco, it might be difficult to proclaim absolute certainty over such reports, but Iran has been the intelligence agencies’ top priority for many years and there is a high degree of confidence, albeit not shared by Mr Netanyahu, that they would provide enough warning to take action before it was too late.

Whether there is room for compromise between Mr Obama’s and Mr Netanyahu’s red lines is questionable. There is now a good six to nine months in which the two men—if Mr Obama is re-elected—can edge closer. That also means another six to nine months for sanctions to do their work. It is just possible that the Iranian regime has some red lines of its own when it comes to the amount of misery it risks its people enduring before looking for a diplomatic way out.