Iran in 2007

We had a Iran in 2006 thread but it was kinda short. This year could be more, how you say, 'interesting,' what with claims like this from the increasingly schizophrenic Ralph Peters that the appointment of Admiral Fallon to run Central Command is part of a Great Big Strategy No Really. The various fantasies among the RedState/BlackFive crowd about 'blowing up them Iranians real good' I leave to the Ledeen fetishists.

More interesting is this story, latest in a line of stories about US plans to essentially generate an internal Iranian crisis centered around their oil reserves. A useful enough section:

First is the condition of Iran's aging oil fields, which have never fully recovered from damage inflicted during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. To maintain enough pressure to keep them pumping at all, Iran has to divert large amounts of natural gas that might otherwise be sold.

"You need billions of dollars invested in order to stand still ? to avoid a decline," said Manouchehr Takin, a former Iranian oil geologist who is now a senior analyst with the Center for Global Energy Studies in London.

Likewise, new refinery construction is being overwhelmed by the swelling number of young Iranians and their fondness for gas-guzzling cars. Heavily subsidized gasoline is just 35 cents a gallon, a price that invites huge amounts of smuggling, and years of talk about raising the price have, until recently, gone nowhere.

Moreover, the country has one of the most extensive residential heating infrastructures in the world, with homes in the most remote villages warmed toastily with cheap natural gas. Total domestic energy subsidies cost $20 billion to $30 billion a year, Takin said.

"These subsidies are now costing the government roughly 15% of Iran's GDP. That should knock you over. That's a mind-boggling number," said Hossein Askari, professor of international business at George Washington University. "And the nub of the problem is that if you were to cut the subsidies, I think there would be riots in the streets."

Iran could be reinvesting in the oil and gas infrastructure and rapidly built new refineries, and it is to a degree, but Ahmadinejad has also diverted billions of dollars in oil revenues for social welfare programs, to major infrastructure building programs in neighboring countries such as Afghanistan, and to importing consumer products ? to the consternation of many of those in his government.

I admit that bit about the heating subsidies honestly caught me off guard; I can easily see why it exists (we're talking about a country on a mountainous plateau for the most part), but at that amount?