Obama: Iran Says Sanctions Relief Will Be Used to Benefit ‘Lives of the Iranian People’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

"Third, a number of critics say the deal isn't worth it because Iran will get billions of dollars in sanctions relief. Let's be clear. The international sections were put in place to get Iran to agree to constraint on its program. That's the point of sanctions. Any negotiated agreement with Iran would involve sanctions relief.

So an argument against sanctions relief is effectively an argument against any diplomatic resolution of this issue. It is true that, if Iran lives up to its commitments, it will gain access to roughly $56 billion of its own money, money that has been frozen overseas by the countries. With all this money funneled into Iran's pernicious activities misses the reality of Iran's current situation.

Partly because of our sanctions, the Iranian government has over half $1 trillion in urgent requirements from funding pensions and salaries to paying for crumbling infrastructure. Iran's leaders have raised expectations of their people, that sanctions relief will improve their lives. Even a repressive regime like Iran's cannot completely ignore those expectations. And that's why our best analysts expect the bulk of this revenue to go into spending that improves the economy and benefits the lives of the Iranian people.

This is not to say the sanctions relief will provide no benefit to Iran's military. Let's stipulate that some of that money will flow to activities that we object to. We have no illusions about the Iranian government or the significance of the revolutionary guard and the quds force. Iran supports terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. It supports profit groups that threaten our interests and interests of our allies, including proxy groups who killed our troops in Iraq. They tried to destabilize our golf partners -- our gulf partners.

But Iran has been engaged in these activities for decades. They engaged in them before sanctions and while sanctions were in place. In fact, I ran engaged in these sanctions in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, a war that cost them nearly a million lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. The truth is that Iran has always found a way to fund these effort. Sanctions relief pales in comparison to the danger it could pose with a nuclear weapon."