The officials also claimed that most of the sanctions, including multilateral sanctions, could be snapped back into place if Iran cheated, and they argued that giving Iran tens of billions of dollars in cash won’t dramatically increase Iran’s spending on terrorism and other nefarious activities. [emphasis added]
Now we have a figure to help define the "dramatic" threshold as money has flowed to Iran post-sanctions:
The government budget did increase 35 percent this year but not a lot of the additional $25 billion went to fostering economic growth. The defense budget nearly doubled, to $19 billion.
So nearly a 100% increase in formal defense spending.
Call me paranoid, but I bet the money that Iran spends on supporting terrorism and Shia insurrection in the region isn't a published figure, yet went up a lot too.
The president's goodness lessons just aren't taking in Tehran.
UPDATE: Here's some more drama:
The Obama administration has concluded that uranium particles discovered last year at a secretive Iranian military base likely were tied to the country’s past, covert nuclear weapons program, current and former officials said, a finding that contradicts Tehran’s longstanding denials that it was pursuing a bomb.
Traces of man-made uranium were found at the Parchin facility, southeast of Tehran, by investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, as part of an investigation tied to the landmark nuclear deal reached last July between Iran and global powers.
The Iranians have claimed that the site was used for developing and testing conventional weapons. The particles were the first physical evidence—on top of satellite imagery and documents from defectors—to support the charge that Iran had been pursuing a bomb there.
We can't rely on the IAEA to prevent Iran from going nuclear and the IAEA can't even go to Parchin or any other "military" site declared off limits.
And if Iran really did halt work on nuclear warheads in 2003, why isn't the logical reason that Iran no longer needs to do work on nuclear warheads? Perhaps Iran got a design from Pakistan when they were in the nuclear export business? Perhaps Iran is letting North Korea perfect the engineering, eh, given the close work between those two pariah (and Axis of Evil) states?
Have a super sparkly day.
