The Truthdig article How China Has Benefited From America’s Hostility to Iran quotes from the Barry Lando article China and Iran. Lessons from a Lab Rat.

True to form, the Americans have been pushing trade sanctions in various degrees of severity ever since American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran back in 1979.

The Chinese argue the current stiff sanctions won’t convince the Iranians to stop their nuclear program. However, those sanctions have certainly helped the Chinese gain a remarkable foothold in Iran.
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And as all this has been going on, the Chinese have been prospering.  Chinese/Iranian trade has mushroomed from $3.3 billion in 2001 to $30 billion in 2010, and is expected to hit $50 billion by 2015.  The prize, though is the gas and petroleum.

Is this rise in trade between Iran and China what causes Obama to assure us that the sanctions are working?

A while ago, someone came up with the good advice, “The President ought not say things that he knows are untrue.”

The Truth Dig story Big CIA Bust Reported in Iran, starts with:

This information, we should note, comes from Iran’s state-sponsored news agency, but officials in Tehran said Wednesday they had arrested as many as 12 CIA agents who had been working undercover to gather intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program and what the government planned to do with it.

If Truth Dig were aware of the Seymour hersh story discussed in my previous post Propaganda Driven Hysteria Over Iranian Nuke Program, they might not be so dismissive of the report by the Iranian news agency.

I wonder if this result of the  unmasking of the CIA spy ring was an “aw sh*t” moment for Seymour Hersh.  How do you measure the trade-off of debunking our own propaganda that might lead us to an unnecessary war with the possible disclosure that might have led to the arrest of our spies?