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"... would any refined products be allowed (by "us") to go back into Iran? "
Various articles in the past year have indicated they require the European's to refine 50% of their gasoline. I am not sure how much of their own refineries contribute to cuts/fractions that are then sent to petrochemical plants for converting the myriad of things like plastics, pre-cursors for many industrial processes, for pharmeceuticals etc..
They sell the crude oil to the Europeans and expect a given amount of gasoline to be shipped back.
So if we cut them off from this vital need they are going to really start hurting.
Now. We could always throw in the Russians into the equation. Would the Ruskies make arrangements to ship gas to the Iranians despite sanctions that would include cutting off exporting gasoline to them. I have not a clue as to what could happen in that department.
Obviously the Russians want some thirty percent ownership in joint gas pipelines that would be built that would include a line to service the Chinese.
As for the use of "they". Understand. Your feedback is quite understandable/clearity.
I am no expert on the Iranians by any means. But surely enough stuff posted here over a period of time has indicated there is plenty of disent, and downright mistrust in the government and mullah overseers as how this guy is conducting himself. Most of them simply want no parts of his Messianic thougts. They rather maintain their nice positions of power and wealth. Their president may just be pushing things to a point where he will have to be removed, and have a quieter clown put in his place.
And lets face it. Most of the ME Arab muslims want nothing to do with this Iranian regime. They do not trust them nor by culture want to embrace them as friends. The Saudi's for instance are amoung the most outspoken in the negative of Iran.
Yemen, Suadi Arabia, UAE, Baran, Qatar, Kuwait, want to move as far away from the old ways and modernize as they can. They don't like it one bit when this crack head says he will destroy the oil shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, and send missles into the refineries on the western coasts.
He is as isolated at this point as NK is. He screams his head off to detract some of his people from their current miseries and not appear like the raving *sshole he really is, when it comes to planning on taking their remaining freedoms away. That is one reason I think why this administration and quite frankly previous ones, are bidding time.
We are waiting for a counter revolution to take place in Iran and overthrow the mullahs and allow for a truely freely elected governing body to materialize, with the prime goal of moving away from Islamic rule.
As for as nukes. They may be a few years away from actually constructing a reliable low yield device.
To much had been written, often quite contrary as to how well their uranium gas diffusion processes are progressing. It is a long way between being able to manufacture enough say 5% enriched U235 for fueling one reactor, and producing enough U235 of weapon grade.
Unless they have really come up with the final manufacturing facilities to provide the required amount of UF gas (remember it was discovered that they had 90 tons stored but it turns out it was tainted and could not be used for feed stock to their existing series/parallel cascade system), and that they had actually gotten enough HF6 from Pakistan to produce that small amount of reactor grade uranium the nut case made such a big deal over.
There are many steps required to produce the HF6 in a pure enough form for use as feed stock. And I don't think they have all those manufacturing steps down pat yet. From the initial refining and processing of crude uranium ore into yellow cake, then the acidification steps into the HF6 gas, proper storage, then proper automated manufacturing techniques required for a full blown large gas diffusion processing plant (say the 50,000 units they claim to have).
And I think our government and others fully understand there may be a year or two before they really have to start to worry if Iran could get close to building a bomb.
Meanwhile IMHO, I think a lot of what we have seen are the politics and posturing taking place due to the Iraqi syndrom.
We got them all really scared at this point. It is no longer business as usual in the ME. The governments are not going to start to be held accountable for the welfare of the peoples. And the Iranian mullahs realize their days are numbered. So they rigged things for this goon to become the president, but know must be wondering what the hell did they do. He could get them all killed.

"It is no longer business as usual in the ME. The governments are not going to start to be held accountable for the welfare of the peoples. And the Iranian mullahs realize their days are numbered. So they rigged things for this goon to become the president, but know must be wondering what the hell did they do. He could get them all killed."

Um, I thought the ME governments not being accountable for the welfare of the people WAS business as usual. But I would agree with you that we and our allies have changed the picture there, at least somewhat...

Am I correct that the prior Iranian regime seemed to be moderating a bit, but before that, the regime(s) were still pretty radical / counter to U.S. interests?

Another angle: Let's say I include "dirty bombs" as a type of nuke. 10 dirty bombs on the "right" day with the wind in the "right" direction. Pretty well wipes out Israel, I would guess? Not that the reaction / retaliation would be any different. So is all the current effort to "keep Iran from getting nukes" just for show? Maybe we expect 'em to violate any U.N. resolution, but figure sanctions might bring down the regime sooner? (Seems iffy -- sanctions did not bring down Saddam Hussein.)

I follow you on the nukes manufacturing, though. (Am an EE, and, unrelated, regularly pass by a large gaseous diffusion plant in our area - quite a facility.)

Interesting point about the Russians. I wonder how much spare refining capacity they have.

Also an interesting point about the ME countries that want to modernize. With all that oil wealth, a path more like China's (grow economically) would be far more successful than Iran's current path.

Pretty interesting weapons Hezbollah seems to have acquired.

Elections: Seems like a mixed bag in the ME. The dweeb I heard on CNN (or was it Fox) last night used Iran as an example of elections giving a bad result, which I think is silly: Those were not free elections. On the other hand, the Palis elected Hamas. I know that's largely because they were the only alternative to the (highly corrupt) PLO, but, still... And, how would a truly free election in, say, Egypt, come out if held today? (Rhetorical question.)