Naming the Year: Strategy Setting or an Impossible Wish
Naming the Year: Strategy Setting or an Impossible Wish According to Iran Gate, since around the mid-2000s, every year the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran in his New Year speech names the new year with a slogan. Is this tradition a strategy setting or an impossible wish? It seems that this approach and slogan setting have essentially had no positive effect on the emphasized axes in recent years.
Because in recent years, the most emphasis has been on the economy and production. However, this well, although it had no water for the people of Iran, provided good bread for many in organizations and some opportunistic and affiliated companies. This is because, from the day after the announcement of the new year’s name, projects for ordering and installing various billboards and banners in cities and government and semi-government offices begin. Sometimes, like last year when the emphasis on strengthening the knowledge-based economy was prominent in the year’s slogan, it even led to the production of Isfahan’s gaz, but of the knowledge-based kind.
Bank managers are all ears to offer banking facility packages in line with the year’s slogan to both please the leadership and sweeten the people’s taste with knowledge-based gaz and sohan. Of course, some opportunistic special interest groups always have economic plans with enough blank spaces to be immediately filled with suitable words matching the year’s slogan and to take full advantage of the system’s bounty.
However, the noteworthy point is the lack of attention to necessities and prerequisites in the economy. The economy is essentially a scientific and highly specialized phenomenon that is very different from a command and control approach. Setting and targeting strategies are not subject to orders but follow appropriate planning and implementation of requirements.
This year, Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has named the year’s slogan as ‘controlling inflation and increasing production,’ which more reflects his wish to rid himself of the rampant inflation and high statistics of disease and recession. Otherwise, how can someone be involved in politics and not know that the governance model and anti-norm foreign policy set by the leader of the Islamic Republic as the foremost power and policy setter are completely contrary to repairing the fragile economy’s damaged body?
These days, Iran’s economy is more in need of foreign investment than ever. Our industries in the oil and gas sectors and other important branches of industry need modernization. In terms of international economics and foreign trade, we must strive hard to develop this trade model with the world.
In today’s trade world, the dollar holds a forty percent share, and in Europe’s trade and transactions with the common currency euro, about eighty percent is the dollar’s share. How can we see and hear all these realities, and the new year is named ‘controlling inflation and increasing production,’ and the day after the leader of the Islamic Republic talks about removing the dollar from foreign and essentially the country’s economy?
This model definition reminds one of the famous joke where after a proposal, the person says fifty percent of the matter is solved because we liked it, only the bride’s family’s opinion remains. Well, in today’s economic world, what role and share do we essentially have that now we want to mandate and implement a new model without relying on the dollar? We do not intend to delve into the economy but are looking to examine the country’s governance method and that too at the highest possible level.
For the leader of the government to pass off a wish as a strategy and for a group always flattering from the second person down to start praising and flattering that such a thought and message has led the country to be caught in costly and ineffective flawed paradigms and to accept them as a tradition in governance and a significant part of its policy-making.
I wish politicians would realize that the world is not run on our ideals and wishes but moves forward based on realities, laws, and current relations, and moving against global norms without having sufficient economic-political power yields nothing but the defeat of nations.