Much about the price of crude oil this year has had to do with Iran, but Iran has to do with much beyond the price of oil.
The revolutionary government's nuclear program and threats against Israel have destabilized the world's most important oil-producing region. Augmented by civil war in Syria, concern has been intense enough to keep crude prices higher than market fundamentals indicate they should be.
Official Iranian belligerence doesn't only project outward. Oppression is an ugly fact of life inside the Islamic Republic.
The European Parliament (EP) provided a timely reminder about pressures inside Iran by naming two Iranian dissidents winners of the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. EP Pres. Martin Schulz expressed hope for their attendance at a December award ceremony in Strasbourg. For that, prospects are poor. Both winners have been in Iranian prisons since 2010. One of them, Nasrin Sotoudeh, is a lawyer who has represented activists jailed for opposing Iran's disputed presidential elections of 2009, juveniles facing the death penalty, women, and prisoners of conscience, according to the EP.
She has been in solitary confinement since her arrest on charges of spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security. The mother of two, Sotoudeh recently began a hunger strike to protest the government's harassment of her family.
Her cowinner is Jafar Panahi, a film director, screenwriter, and editor whose work often highlights hardships of children, the poor, and women in Iran.
Panahi's film The White Balloon won a Camera d'Or award at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. His latest work, This Is Not a Film, reached last year's Cannes festival after being smuggled out of Iran on a memory stick hidden in a cake.
In addition to incarcerating Panahi for 6 years, the regime prohibited him for 20 years from directing movies and leaving the country.
As always, the beginning of wisdom about Iran is recognition of the internal fractures that harden a wicked regime and keep its survival ever in question.
