THE Iranian parliament has just fired Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian. The move, which is likely to end in Karbasian’s impeachment, was undoubtedly prompted by the country’s Guardian Council, the 12-man body directed by supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Legislators also summoned ayatollah Hassan Rouhani, the largely powerless president, to explain his government’s failure to sort out problems in the banking and tax systems and its inability to halt a growing economic collapse which had seen the currency halve in value while the price of staples mushrooms.

Rouhani admitted that ordinary Iranians were losing faith in the government which was facing critical problems, that he blamed on US sanctions. Having made this point, he proceeded to grandstand, vowing that the country would not bow to the efforts by the Trump White House to scupper to 2015 nuclear deal. Iran was not afraid of America, he thundered, and it would overcome its troubles. It was however a hollow performance and Rouhani himself must have appreciated this. A so-called moderate within the ruling clerical establishment, he is as well placed as anyone to understand that the root causes of the country’s economic mess. For sure the international sanctions imposed because of the ayatollahs’ refusal to abandon their nuclear arsenal ambitions, served to isolate Iranians, both economically and culturally from the global community. And their re-imposition by an implacable President Trump will in the long-term impose even greater pain. But the core issue lies in the corruption, mismanagement and sheer incompetence which has filtered down from the highest levels of the regime and its merciless enforcers, the Revolutionary Guards.

So when the supreme leader’s rubber-stamp parliament condemned Karbasian for his failure to stop the country’s crisis, it was , though of course the legislators could hardly admit it to themselves, actually denouncing the economic illiteracy and self-seeking plunder of their own regime.

It is typical of a government that has run out of ideas, such as in Iran or even more egregiously in Venezuela, sets out to blame absolutely everyone except itself for its manifest failures. The standard bleat from Tehran is that its economic catastrophe has been caused entirely by US sanctions. But this has only ever been partly true. Washington’s sanctions after the Revolutionary Guards seized US embassy staff in 1979 were expanded by the UN Security Council in 2006 when the ayatollahs refused to curb their nuclear program. But the top echelons of the regime continued to benefit from extensive smuggling, particularly of luxury goods, particularly from Russia and Turkey.

The larger impact of sanctions has been a wound which, thanks to their pride, stubbornness and even their ignorance, the ayatollahs have inflicted on Iranians. The BBC just carried a telling package in which it conducted phone interviews with ordinary people. One long-suffering citizen in Tehran made an extraordinarily telling point. He noted that when the price of bread goes up “We blame the enemy”. When the price of the dollar goes up “We blame the enemy”. Additionally the country’s current drought is being blamed on “the enemy”. Popular protests are also always blamed on “the enemy”. He then asked the question which must be on the lips of millions of his miserable fellow countrymen: “If you are so sure about this enemy, why don’t you just make peace with him and end all this?”