The moral of the story is Money Talks. An embargo is toothless if we have to keep buying Iran's oil. Once we can get our oil without them, the embargo starts to bite hard. The mullahs are looking at what happened in Egypt and Tunisia and Syria, and they can do the math. About 60% of their population is under 30. They are young, educated and unemployed, which is the recipe for social unrest and political instability. The sanctions are making an already bad problem much worse. If they have to choose between obtaining nuclear weapons, or regime survival, they will make the obvious choice.