With oil in retreat, Iran's good times are almost over

McClatchy's, here

"...Buoyed by a vast pool of oil income as prices soared to near $150 a barrel, Iran has until now been able to blunt the sanctions' pain. And, all but cut off from the world financial system thanks to the U.S. Treasury Department, it's watched the global economic crisis from splendid isolation.......

With oil now hovering around $40 a barrel (and Iran's lower-quality crude selling even cheaper), bad news is just over the horizon, they say. Foreign imports will be throttled, incomes will drop, Iran's currency will weaken and inflation will grow even worse. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's populist spending programs, which have bloated the government budget but bolstered his popularity with poor Iranians, could sputter to a halt......

No matter how tough conditions get, few observers here expect Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in such matters, to surrender on the nuclear issue..."