March 30, 2012: A major reason for Iran's enthusiastic and expensive (billions of dollars so far) support of the Syrian dictatorship is the increasing use of Syria as a way to buy weapons that several embargos prevent Iran from buying directly. Neither Syria nor Iran will admit this sort of thing is going on but Syria has spent five times as much on imported weapons during the past five years, than it did in the previous five years. At the same time, the Syrian economy has been getting worse in the last decade. The cash for all these new weapons purchases (most of them from Russia) has come from Iran, and some of the weapons have shown up in Iran.