The Islamic Republic has never had competent urban planners; rather, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commercial considerations often took precedence.By Michael Rubin, Middle East ForumFaucets are beginning to run dry in Tehran. The cause is not climate change, although Tehran suffers from drought, but rather decades of the Islamic State’s mismanagement and corruption.In response, President Masoud Pezeshkian has proposed moving the capital. It would not be the first time Iran’s capital has moved.Over the centuries, the capital of Iran—or Persia, as the country was called before 1935—passed through many cities: Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, and fifty other cities, some still standing and others in ruins.Topographically, Tehran is like Denver, Colorado. Just as Denver rises out of the midwestern planes and abuts the Rocky Mountains to the city’s west, Tehran sits at the very edge of the Alborz Mountains, even more closely abutting them than Denver does the Rockies.Tehran then spreads out on the gentle slopes of the plains to the mountain chain’s south. This has traditionally led to one of Tehran’s most unique features: jubes.Water flows through these open concrete channels from glacial streams. In the northern reaches of the city, the water is pure; by the time the water flows into the south of the city, the jubes can be open sewers.Still, with glacial water so close, Iranian officials as recently as a decade ago claimed Tehran had some of the best tap water in the world.Managing Tehran never has been easy. Agha Mohammad Khan, the founder of the Qajar dynasty (1794-1925), designated Tehran as his capital to escape ossified elites in Isfahan and take advantage of the city’s pleasant climate and its proximity to the Alborz.For more than a century, Tehran was little more than a quaint town. It began growing rapidly in the twentieth century. In 1950, it had barely a million people.As Mohammad Reza Shah industrialized Iran, millions of Iranians from villages and rural areas poured into the city in pursuit of jobs and a better life.By 1970, Tehran’s population had tripled. Approximately five million people lived in the city by the time of the Islamic Revolution.Today, that number has almost doubled, and perhaps an equal number live in the greater Tehran area.Even the best urban planners would be hard-pressed to keep up with such growth, but the Islamic Republic has never had competent urban planners; rather, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commercial considerations often took precedence.This is one of the reasons why, even before the spigots ran dry, there was talk of moving Iran’s capital. In the aftermath of the 2003 Bam earthquake, Hassan Rouhani, then the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, proposed moving Iran’s capital from Tehran.If an earthquake could devastate a relatively rural area like Bam, his logic went, then the damage it could do to a city of millions with poorly constructed skyscrapers would be too great to bear.First, moving the government from Tehran would still leave millions of people without water. Transferring these families anywhere else in the country would cause huge strain on shaky provisional systems.Second, blaming drought alone avoids the elephants in the room: poor management and corruption.As Dalga Khatinoglu, an expert on Iran’s energy and macroeconomics, detailed in September 2025, Iran recycles only 15 percent of wastewater, while this figure is upwards of 90 percent in countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Qatar.Iran, meanwhile, extracts groundwater at almost an order of magnitude above the proportion of its population.For decades, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps monopolized dam building to siphon money into its own coffers.Unnecessary damming cut water flow, diverting it away from major population centers. This, and not drought, was why Isfahan’s famous Zayandeh Rud ran dry for the first time in more than five centuries.Iranian authorities now propose to move their capital to Iran’s southern Makran coast, a project that could cost more than $100 billion. Such a scheme would be a boondoggle.Far from being a “lost paradise,” Makran has among Iran’s harshest climates and most difficult topographies. To move the capital from Tehran to Chabahar would be akin to moving the White House to Death Valley.Then again, the major beneficiaries of the investment needed for such a move would be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the same group whose scheming set Iran off the water precipice.Then again, for the Revolutionary Guard, that may be the point.The post Iran changing its capital? It won’t solve anything – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.