In Iran one of the armies (IRGC) controls most of the economy, including agriculture, dam building and exports, three areas which are very linked to the water mismanagement. Add the fact that their generals are getting rich through corruption you can imagine the situation is a bit different than the US army

Regardless the budget you are quoting does not include the billions that are invested yearly on Hezbollah, Hamas, PMF and Houthis which are strategically considered and used as an extension of their armed forces

What are talking about? Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles ( before the 12 day war) , not to mention funding the proxies ( ring of fire). If it invested the money in water infrastructure instead of nuclear weapons or Hizbollah they would not be in such dire situation.

I don’t think Iran is hiding the fact they are building nuclear weapon tech and long range ballistic missiles capable of MIRV.

People dismissed North Korea’s ability to do so for a long time. They thought they were too poor and isolated.

Iran supplies Shahed long range drones to Russia for years now. They became their staple of terror bombings since.

They are also deployed domestic production of them in Russia but a substantial amount of components (foremost motors) still delivered from Iran. If you look at the chart of Russian Shahed launches you can see a lagging dip in early August after Israel's bombing of Iran in June.

> more information than the IAEA.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iaea-report-says-iran-ha...

Yes. They want to build nukes. I'll never understand how the Iranian bot campaign[1] managed to convince so many people.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg

When you build all the technology needed to actually build a nuke, when you enrich uranium to near weapons-grade, but you never actually assemble the nuke, are you trying to building a nuke? Or are just messing with everyone, trying to make them think you're building a nuke when you're totally not building a nuke (pinkie promise)?

Either way, if you are threatening to annihilate another country, I wouldn't gamble on the latter.

Israel also said Pakistan was trying to build nukes, but they were stopped by the Indian PM in the 1980s from launching a preventive attack.

The silver lining is that we don't have to suffer the internet commentators saying "Pakistan has been weeks away from nukes for fifty years!"

You can choose to put your head in the sand about a theocracy that enriches uranium to 60%, holds up mushroom clouds in their protests, and repeatedly violated the NPT with clandestine facilities. Others won't be so naive.

> There are innocent people being killed (15K+) on both sides of the Ukraine conflict.

But it's more than a little lopsided, and there's only one aggressor in the war – one who could choose to end it at any time.

Regardless of when it was initiated or by who, the current regime is who has the power to end it today.

The civilian nuclear program. Not the enrich to 60% and build secret underground enrichment facilities in violation of the NPT -- for no reason whatsoever, I am assured -- nuclear program.

This is quite a distortion of the facts to push an agenda.

Desalination technology can solve their problems completely, but they armed proxies that attacked the two countries in the region (Saudi Arabia and Israel) that can help them.

They also imprisoned the one qualified guy in their country who blew the whistle on their water mismanagement (e.g. farming water intensive crops in a desert), Dr. Madani.

You could read the Wikipedia page to learn the other man-made reasons behind this crisis. That's preferable than coming here to play defense for a corrupt theocracy. Not that I doubt that climate change is one of the causes.

“If only you had reduced your emissions one of the top 10 largest oil producing countries in the world would not have this problem.”

ETA: China imports 40% of Iranian oil production followed by Iraq, UAE, and Turkey.