Let’s say that you’re the President of a country that has, to put it mildly, a rather mixed public image around the world. When you campaigned for the job, you stressed economic prosperity and traditional religious values. After winning an election that many claim was rigged, you find that the job really isn’t as easy as you thought.

First off, you have a nasty habit of saying really stupid things that offend a whole lot of people around the world. People even call you a warmonger based on your foreign policy. Plus, your economy’s not doing so hot, and the disparity between the rich and the poor keeps increasing. Even though your country has some oil stored up and your government spends a shit-ton of money subsidizing gasoline production, you have to import a lot of gasoline to keep up with demand because damn do your citizens love their cars (and public transportation just ain’t what it could be.) You’re worried that this disparity might lead to budget woes and even another gas crisis.

So, what do you do?

Well, if you’re President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, you come up with the brilliant idea of introducing gasoline rationing that limits Iranian citizens to buying 3.5 liters of gasoline a day for their privately-owned vehicles. You decide to go ahead with this program before hundreds of thousands of Iranians have received the ration cards they now need to purchase gasoline. Oh, and you give everyone, including the police, gas station owners, and the car-owning public, only two hours notice before implementing the new restrictions.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Shortly after the rationing was announced, Iranians took to the streets in Tehran to protest. These protests, the first major ones since Ahmadinejad took office, turned violent as gas stations were vandalized and set on fire. Police attempting to quell the protests wound up being pelted with rocks by crowds chanting, “Guns, fireworks, tanks, Ahmadinejad should be killed.”

Yeah, I don’t get the fireworks part either. Maybe it sounds cooler in Farsi.

Iran’s government decided that the best response to these protests was to tell everyone to shut the fuck up, ordering the press not to publish negative stories about the gasoline rationing plan and turning off Tehran’s mobile phone text messaging network to try and prevent angry motorists from organizing more protests.

Some of you might be saying, “Wait, Iran? They have to ration gasoline in fucking Iran? Don’t they have so much oil they might as well make smoothies out of it?”

While Iran does have massive oil reserves, due to under-investment Iran lacks the ability to refine enough of that oil into gasoline to meet demand. So while Iran exports more than half of the oil it produces, they have to actually import about 40% of the gasoline they consume.

Making matters worse is that Iran has been heavily subsidizing the price of gasoline, which up until now was selling inside Iran for around 1/5th the price that it sells for in other countries in the region. This has led to both overconsumption and a lucrative black market as people can make a tidy profit smuggling cheap gasoline out of Iran.

Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Parliament claim this new rationing program will help prepare Iran to deal with possible future sanctions on gasoline imports that the UN or the US might impose to try and stop Iran from developing nuclear energy (or nuclear weapons, depending on who you listen to). However, Ahmadinejad has already been losing popularity amongst the same working-class Iranians who (theoretically) voted him into office, as his economic policies have failed to curb inflation and unemployment, or to bring about the equitable distribution of oil wealth he promised during his campaign. Many of Ahmadinejad’s supporters are already blaming his hard-line foreign policy stances with increasing U.S. sanctions and making the economy worse, and gasoline rationing is a true “fuck you” to those same supporters. Maybe John McCain won’t get to bomb Iran after all.

At least I’m happy that I don’t have to live with a President that breaks campaign promises and fucks things up by making poorly thought out decisions. I can’t imagine what that’s like.