Iran parliament speaker eyes political gain from president's economic woes

In a phone call with his Venezuelan counterpart, Araghchi condemned what he called "the United States' bullying approach toward Venezuela and other independent developing countries in the Western Hemisphere," according to state media.

Washington’s "threat to use force against Venezuela is a clear example of a gross violation of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter and the peremptory norms of international law," he added.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has been amassing forces in the Caribbean in the biggest military buildup in the region for decades.

Washington accuses Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of narco-terrorism and has offered a $50 million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest. The US strategy remains unclear but appears aimed at unseating the leftist populist.

Ties between Iran and Venezuela flourished under Maduro's predecessor Hugo Chavez and the countries continue to find common ground over objections to US policy.

Araghchi on Wednesday urged UN member states to rally against "America’s aggressive unilateralism" and accused its Mideast foe Israel of being a menace to Latin America, calling it "a major threat to the region’s peace, stability and security."

US news outlets citing US and Israeli officials reported this month that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sought to kill the Israeli ambassador to Mexico but the plot was thwarted over the summer by Mexican security forces. Iran denied the allegations.

As the lines open, I picture Tehran under its nocturnal dome, a sky not dark but dimmed, as if a giant thumb has pressed the horizon into a bruise.

The city breathes shallowly now. Pollution maps pulse in colors that feel less like data than diagnosis: orange, red, a purple so deep it suggests something beyond neglect, something closer to abandonment.

To the north, the Hyrcanian forests, once described by an old ranger as “green witnesses from before language,” have been burning for weeks. Flames move through those ancient stands with a slow, deliberate patience, as if obeying an unseen logic.

From a distance, these may appear as separate misfortunes, poisoned air in the cities, burning lungs in the mountains.

But the longer I listen to callers, the more the crises merge into a single story. In Iran today, even breathing has become contested terrain. Breathing itself is political.

Neither dawn nor dusk

Tehran, a metropolis of more than thirteen million, has offered its residents only a handful of clean-air days this year.

In Karaj, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Tabriz and Isfahan, air-quality readings have climbed into ranges Americans might remember from the rare weeks when wildfires smothered the West Coast.

In Iran, though, the crisis is not a season, it is a condition. Schools close. Emergency rooms fill. Children learn to recognize, by color alone, the days when they must stay indoors. The city moves under a half-light that resembles neither dawn nor dusk.

The voices that reach me on “The Program,” my nightly show, arrive with a clarity that often anticipates scientific explanation.

A mother whose children wake coughing. A factory worker whose exhaustion seems to begin in the mind, not the muscles. A man who runs a short errand and ends the day bedridden.

Later, experts explain these stories in clinical language: microscopic particles slipping through the lungs into the bloodstream, crossing the blood-brain barrier, raising the risk of heart disease, cognitive decline and dementia.

By the government’s own admission, roughly sixty thousand Iranians die each year from air pollution, or nearly 160 people every day.

Hyrcanian forest

Far from the capital, the forests fight their own losing battle for air. The Hyrcanian woodlands, recognized by UNESCO for their botanical uniqueness, have burned across the hills of Chalus and Dizmar.

Each morning, new smoke rises behind press briefings that insist the fires are “contained.” Despite years of warnings, Iran lacks any aerial firefighting ability.

These fires are not anomalies. They are symptoms of deforestation, unrestrained development and a bureaucracy that mistakes denial for strategy.

Nearly half the forests have already been lost. What should be a coordinated national response has instead become a volunteer effort carried out by the people least equipped to shoulder the burden.

Meanwhile a state capable of constructing an enormous surveillance apparatus remains unable to protect the most basic conditions of life: water that sustains, forests that stand, air that does no harm.

For years, Iranians have described political repression as a form of suffocation.

Now the metaphor has become literal. Cities are not simply policed, they are choking. Forests that once served as the country’s lungs burn in pale columns visible for miles.

The distance between living politically and living biologically narrows by the day.

Each night, as the program winds down, I repeat a simple invitation: send a message, and we will send you a link that connects you directly to our studio.

The microphone will pass from my hand to yours. It remains, against the scale of the crisis, a fragile gesture. But in a country where breathing grows harder each year, refusing silence is no longer only a political act, it is an act of survival.

My last caller tells me invokes rock band Nine Inch Nails in a proud, defiant voice: “I got my fist, I got my plan. I got my survivalism.”

I smile. She hangs up, and that is our show for tonight, I say. Take care of the person sitting next to you. I will see you tomorrow night at eleven p.m., Tehran time.

“We are off air,” my director tells me. I lower my forehead to the microphone, close my eyes, and take a long breath.

Hussein, Iraq’s former president, used chemical weapons extensively against Iranian forces and Iraqi Kurds during the conflict.

“The truth must prevail, and those who supported Saddam’s chemical weapons program must be held responsible,” Araghchi told the 30th annual Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in The Hague on Tuesday.

In December 2002, Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung reported that Germany was the country whose companies contributed most to Baghdad’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, citing documents Iraq submitted to the United Nations.

“We urge Germany to release the results of its past investigations and commit to full and transparent investigations about the involvement of its companies and nationals in enabling Saddam’s atrocities,” he said.

Relations between Berlin and Tehran are at a low ebb after Germany joined France and Britain in September in reimposing international sanctions on Iran for what the European powers see as defiance of UN nuclear inspections.

Tehran had also bristled at comments by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz during a surprise military campaign on Iran in June in which he described the attacks as "dirty work Israel is doing for all of us."

Araghchi said Iran’s unanimous election to the Chemical Weapons Convention Executive Council — the 41-member policy-making body of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — was “a meaningful step for all who believe in a world free of chemical weapons.”

“As a nation that has suffered deeply from Saddam’s chemical attacks during the 1980–1988 war on our people, Iran carries enduring wounds that still affect tens of thousands of victims and their families,” he said.

Araghchi attended the conference with Kamal Hoseinpur, a lawmaker from Sardasht, a city in Iran’s northwest near the border with Iraq that was hit by Iraqi chemical attacks in 1987.

Araghchi described Sardasht as “a global symbol of resistance, suffering and the call for justice.”

“The people of Sardasht endured chemical attacks whose consequences continue even today, made worse by unjust US sanctions that restrict access to vital medicines and medical care,” Araghchi said.

Araghchi contrasted Germany with the Netherlands, where Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat was convicted in 2005 for supplying Iraq with chemicals used to produce mustard gas during the 1980s.

“The judicial investigations by Dutch authorities which led to the prosecution and conviction of one Dutch individual is appreciated,” he said. “However, we all know that it was the very minimum and showed only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Justice for the victims is overdue, and their calls for justice must never be forgotten,” he added.

Araghchi's comments come as Iran's own government came under scrutiny after security forces used an unidentified "green gas" against protestors during the nationwide protests in 2022 after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in morality police custody.

In November 2022, videos were posted on social media that showed thick green smoke wafting through the streets in Javanrud in Western Iran as security forces there confronted protesters.

The German newspaper Bild reported in 2018 that Berlin had approved a license for a company to sell technology with potential military applications to Iranian firms which were ultimately used by the Syria in domestic chemical weapons attacks.

“In practice, administrations use pricing policies merely to cover budget deficits and may claim they want to develop renewable resources, while this has appeared in six development plans and has not been implemented,” Reza Sepahvand, a senior member of parliament’s energy committee, said in a roundtable discussion carried by Iranian media.

Sepahvand said political and commercial interference has pushed water policy off approved tracks, channeling investment into ill-suited mega-projects and heavy industry in arid regions and aggravating tensions between provinces and farmers. “What forces have pushed the country off the proper path of water management?” he questioned.

He cited the clustering of steel pellet plants around Ardakan in Yazd – a central desert region – and long-running fights over piping water from one region to another as choices that worsen shortages.

The debate comes as experts blame decades of over-extraction, unchecked urban growth and placing water-hungry industries in the desert – alongside drier weather – for pushing groundwater sources and lakes to the brink.

They say lasting fixes require enforcing ecological limits, curbing groundwater pumping, and shifting money from large dams and pipelines to watershed restoration and reuse.

Tariffs miss the real drain

Investigative journalist Amirhadi Anvari told Iran International that raising prices would make little difference and will be marginal at best.

“Iran uses more than 90% of its water in agriculture. The share of municipal drinking water is estimated at 6% to 8%, and industry at 2% to 3%. In these circumstances, changing the price of urban and industrial water will not make much difference.”

He said the core problem is not household behavior but the policy model guiding farms, arguing that the agriculture model is driven by ideology, not resource limits.

“The important point about the agriculture sector is that it is ideological. All top-level policy documents, laws and development plans under both leaders of the Islamic Republic – Khomeini and Khamenei – have been built on self-sufficiency.”

Anvari links self-sufficiency to expansion of irrigated farming despite dwindling supplies.

“To achieve food self-sufficiency, you must expand the cultivated area. Many of Iran’s rain-fed fields... have now been turned into irrigated lands. This was not the choice of farmers; it was an ideological program of the Islamic Republic’s leaders.”

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Profiteering derails reforms

Mehdi Zare, a scientist who has studied environmental risk and infrastructure, said during the same roundtable that short-term interests across the system have repeatedly overridden sound planning.

“All of this has beneficiaries – from users to those who influence studies and decisions,” he said. “Unless we establish an order that can restrain short-term gains, stakeholders can bend trajectories and prevent the situation from reaching equilibrium.”

Zare warned that bias can creep in even at high-level policy meetings, shaping outcomes on issues such as securing Lake Urmia’s water rights, limiting new wells around Tehran, or managing migration to the capital region.

“Advisers may be top experts, but if they have a bias, they can guide decisions so that, for example, the priority is not the lake’s environmental flow or reducing extra abstraction,” he said.

Other specialists in the event echoed calls to sequence reforms. They argued that real-world pricing only works alongside non-price measures such as clearer water rights, enforcement, modern irrigation and industrial recycling, particularly calling for transparency on where revenue goes.

They also questioned utilities’ reliance on water sales to fund operations, saying the model creates pressure to sell more rather than conserve.

Sepahvand said policy should curb politically driven megaprojects and re-orient investment toward groundwater recharge and watershed management, adding that any tariff rises should follow – not replace – structural fixes.

The experts in the event, however, cautioned that without governance changes to insulate water decisions from narrow interests, higher bills alone will neither restore depleted aquifers nor ease tensions between regions competing for dwindling supplies.

“If I were a decision maker, I would have joined the plan endorsed by Saudi Arabia, which conditions recognition of Israel on its acceptance of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders,” he said.

Safavi, 44, the son of former Revolutionary Guards commander Yahya Rahim Safavi, added: “Israel will never accept the two-state solution, but Iran would demonstrate it has no intention of undermining the internationally recognized order.”

He stressed he spoke personally and not for the state.

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Safavi also said recognition of Israel is “impossible under Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership,” while allowing that “in the long term, no one knows.”

The article said debate over Iran’s direction has widened among well-connected figures after a brief war with Israel in June.

Other prominent voices cited by the outlet include Faezeh Hashemi – a former lawmaker and daughter of ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – who said Iran should re-establish diplomatic ties with Washington and take “meaningful steps towards substantial change.”

The article also referenced figures from influential families who have at times diverged publicly from hardline positions, including cleric the grandchild of the Islamic Republic’s founder Hassan Khomeini, his brother Ali, and lawyer Hassan Younesi, the son of a former intelligence minister.

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The article emphasized that their comments reflect a broader discussion inside elite circles rather than an official policy shift.

There is no indication Iran’s leadership plans to adopt the proposals described, the Financial Times said, adding that the debate may gain importance as the country looks ahead to eventual succession for the 86-year-old Supreme Leader.