A regime that can't keep the taps running can't expect to survive forever

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In King of Kings, his recounting of events leading to the 1979 fall of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty, author Scott Anderson depicts the crisis as a catastrophic mix of  failures: on the U.S. side hubris, ignorance, incompetence, and a fierce determination to ignore the obvious; on the Iranian side corruption, inequality, megalomania and a leader catastrophically blind to the impending storm.

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Then-president Jimmy Carter was too distracted to grasp what was happening; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Shahs, Light of the Aryans, never did come to understand.

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Today’s U.S. administration is undoubtedly much better and more accurately informed about developments in Tehran, which threaten the current regime much as its predecessors did the Pahlavi throne. But Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is both as powerful and autocratic, and if anything more ruthless, than the Shah. At 36 years of absolute power, he’s ruled just two fewer than Pahlavi.

He faces an outbreak of rage much like the one that ultimately forced the departure of the aging and ailing Shah. Many of the conditions are similar: a collapsing economy, crushing social divisions, rampant corruption and a convergence of anger among groups across society that share little but their hatred for a leadership they blame for their misery.

The trigger in the 1979 revolt was the uniting figure of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the intransigent Islamic scholar intent on replacing the monarchy with a theocratic Islamic state. No such figure has emerged as yet to threaten Khamenei, his successor. And while there are many reasons for Iranians’ discontent, a key factor is not political or religious but far more prosaic: Iran’s lakes and rivers are running dry. There’s not enough water. The 10 million residents of the country’s capital were told this summer they might have to evacuate the city due to the regime’s inability to keep the taps running and the toilets flushing.

Environmentalists point to climate change as the culprit, the evidence being six years of ruinous drought. But Iran is an arid country that has experienced droughts for centuries. It long ago developed a system for handling them, known as