Iran imports from U.S. rise sharply as officials thumb nose at sanctions
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 at 9:46AM 
Photo of VP Biden: Screen snip from video.In the interview-style debate with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, Vice President Joe Biden (D) implied Iran’s economy is in shambles because of sanctions. Biden projected President Barack Obama as a tough leader who has made a big difference when it comes to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile Iran is thumbing its nose at the U.S. and the European Union because it’s possible the depreciation of Iran’s currency could actually benefit the business sector in that country.
What’s even more interesting is that Iran has sharply increased U.S. imports.
Reuters reported that U.S. exports to Iran have “jumped” by approximately 33 percent.
Iran’s top imports from the U.S. were wheat, corn and other grains.
Obama actually diluted existing sanctions with his Iran-reset. Obama’s policy enabled Iran to, as the Middle East Media Research Institute described it, become a “Nuclear Threshold State.”
MEMRI said Iran has declared its intention to enrich uranium by as much as 90 percent. FARS, the official media service in Iran, quoted a government official who described “preliminary steps toward the construction of super-heavy nuclear-fueled submarines: ‘Right now, we are at the initial phases of manufacturing atomic submarines.’”
Government officials have also told media Iran has deliberately misled the world about their nuclear program in order to “protect” it.
Another government official told FARS Iran will file a lawsuit over sanctions because of the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.
During the administration of President Bill Clinton, Iran actually reduced imports by 50 percent to avoid complying with economic sanctions, said Foreign Policy Magazine:
[T]he record suggests tempering one's optimism that economic pressure will bring Iran to change its populist policy stances -- either its pernicious domestic economic policy or its adventurist nuclear stance.
Biden gave Americans a misimpression about one of the most significant foreign policy challenges the world faces.
Martha Raddatz, the VP debate moderator, didn’t quiz him on it, and nor have other media.
MEMRI noted Obama’s self-contradictory policy on Iran:
This is because it is the status of threshold state, in the case of states such as Iran, that paves the way for the development of nuclear weapons – even though there is an absolute intention not to allow them in the final stage of their development.
FARS reported Iran's position that can be likened to thumbing its nose at the sanctions: “Tehran has always dismissed [the] West's pressures and stressed that sanctions and embargos merely consolidate Iranians' national resolve to continue the path of progress.”
The scenario Biden drew for Americans about Iran is largely bluster.
(Analysis by Kay B. Day/Oct. 16, 2012)