Iran

Environmental peacekeeping runs into authoritarianism

My friend and colleague is in jail. Unjustly.

Her name is Haleh Esfandiari, and she is a grandmother. In early May, she was thrust into solitary confinement in Iran's Evin Prison with a single blanket. She hasn't been allowed to meet with her friends, family, or lawyers since then. This picture shows Evin Prison nestled within the leafy northern suburbs of Tehran at the foot of snowcapped mountains, but the prison has none of the bucolic qualities that the image suggests. "Notorious" is the ubiquitous descriptor.

Haleh's "crime" is doing what we do every day here at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.: provide a safe space where scholars, policy-makers, and ordinary men and women can learn from one another through open, nonpartisan dialogue on today's most pressing issues. Or at least we thought it was safe.

Iran and oil

So, let's return to a familiar subject: The use of oil as a political tool in international relations.

Iran's heading toward nukes. The U.S. wants to prevent it. So the U.S. is threatening economic sanctions -- specifically, threatening to restrict Iran's major export, oil.

But, ahem, don't we need that oil? Points out Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "You need us more than we need you. All of you today need the Iranian nation."

Kevin Drum asks, and Stuart Staniford answers, the obvious question: Could cutting off, or even slowing down, Iranian oil exports really do that much damage to us, or to the world economy?

The short answer is: Yes.

So the next time somebody's calculating the economic cost of Kyoto, or a carbon tax, or emissions caps, I hope that in the "continuing the status quo" column they don't forget to include, "inability to prevent a large Middle Eastern country headed by maniacs from acquiring nuclear weapons." How much does that run these days?