If the Thais had to have a coup, they couldn’t have picked a better time for it — upstaging for a moment Tuesday’s all-Ahmadinejad all-the-time media coverage of the UN General Assembly.

But only for a moment. Ahmadinejad came to New York to strut the world stage, and last evening that is exactly what the UN helped him do — despite Iran’s mockery of the Security Council’s August 31 deadline to surrender its nuclear bomb program.

From the United Nations press balcony, with its view across the vast chamber of the General Assembly, there was a particularly good view of Ahmadinejad’s transmogrification during this performance from a scruffy little man in a sports jacket to Big Brother gloating over his nuclear racket. Standing in front of the dais manned by high UN officials, the whole scene set against the stage’s sweeping golden backdrop and UN emblem, he began speaking in a soft voice. He quickly got louder and louder, declaiming, ranting, and finally almost chanting, shaking his finger, slicing his hands through the air, delivering a speech packed with “truth,” “peace” “virtue” “justice” — but inverted, twisted, indifferent to facts and emptied of meaning. He lied his head off about Iran’s nuclear bomb program, he rewrote history in his continuing campaign to erase the state of Israel, he blamed on others the terrorist atrocities underwritten by his own regime. He told us that together we can “pave the road for human perfection,” and that peace and justice — as he imagines it for all of us — will sooner or later prevail, “whether we like it or not.”

All this was, as Hugh Hewitt sums it up, “chilling” — “establishing a precedent for all future rogue regimes.”

And what was the UN response? Not all UN delegations were present, but from the many that were, Ahmadinejad drew applause. In keeping with UN ritual, Deputy-Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown (Kofi was presumably at dinner) descended the dais to shake his hand.

That, apparently, is what you get at the UN these days if you are a messianic rogue terrorist-sponsoring tyrant making nuclear bombs in defiance of the Security Council. You get a lot of high-level handshakes, many on camera to beam back home to remind your oppressed citizens how powerful you are. Earlier this month, Kofi Annan himself traveled to Tehran to shake Ahmadinejad’s hand. They had the chance to meet again, at last week’s Non-Aligned summit in Cuba, where Annan thanked each and every participant for the many valuable contributions to whatever Annan’s been doing all these years. Annan’s schedule yesterday showed yet another meeting with Ahmadinejad, in New York — a few hours before the Iranian tyrant’s speech.

Whatever UN officials have been saying during all this handshaking, Ahmadinejad instead of closing his bomb factories keeps voicing demands of his own. In his speech, he demanded among other things that the UN Security Council be reconfigured to eliminate the privileged positions of such nations as the U.S. and U.K. (Russia, China and France, the other members of the veto-wielding Permanent Five, don’t seem to bother him as much). And until his full roster of favored candidates can be added, he wants seats for some of his favorite groups, such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement.

What to do about all of this?

The NY Sun has a good idea: Arrest him.

Geneva-based UN Watch says: Expel him.

I’ll add to the list one more suggestion. What makes that UN stage such a prize for the likes of Ahmadinejad is the support — both political and financial — conferred upon it by the democratic nations of the world, especially the United States. If the UN can’t deal with Ahmadinejad, let Ahmadinejad deal with the UN. Get out, and give it to him. Send it to Tehran, lock, stock and reconfigured Security Council. Let him make all the speeches he wants. With that clutter out of the way, and with the $5.3 billion the U.S. would save every year, plus the considerable moral and political capital we have been squandering on the UN, we might just have a shot at creating in its place institutions that work.

In a switch — sort of — Kofi Annan has finally agreed to fill out one of the financial disclosure forms now required of UN senior staff. But before anyone gets too excited about finally learning, as Roger Simon neatly put it, “How Rich is Kofi?” — or how, when, or if the Secretary-General might have parted ways with the Mystery Mercedes bought by his son in his name — remember that the UN is home to some of the world’s biggest veracity gaps.

1) At the UN, “disclosure” does not necessarily mean the public gets told anything at all. Whatever financial information Kofi might produce will be “disclosed” only in-house, inside the same UN that managed to cover up for years such matters as billions in graft under Oil-for-Food, hundreds of millions worth of allegedly bribe-tainted and/or questionably-allotted procurement contracts, and a variety of odd doings still not well-explained inside its own audit department.

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It’s a good rule of thumb that there is no one more easily offended than your average despot and surrounding acolytes. Tyranny by nature requires grand fictions, and when anyone dares point out that the emperor has no clothes, or the emperor is living it up while dressing his minions in suicide belts, or the emperor is murdering his own subjects and honing technologies and methods to blackmail, subjugate or kill anyone else in reach, then the emperor and his cohorts take huge offense. If you happen to live under their sway, they chuck you in prison. If you are outside the immediate reach of their secret police and terror squads, they do what they can to maneuver the debate onto their terms. They — who apologize for nothing — demand apologies.

On the list of those most prominently offended by the Pope’s speech, for instance, is Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whom Saturday’s New York Times describes as Lebanon’s “most senior Shiite cleric” — a tag that omits his status as chief proselytizer in Lebanon for the Iranian-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah, and one of the gang campaigning — most unapologetically — for the obliteration of Israel. Here’s Fadlallah’s web site, where you can read his dictates on such matters as music and women. By some accounts, Fadlallah has enjoyed the security services of Imad Mugniyah, one of the top killers on the FBI’s most-wanted list of terrorists.

If, regarding the Pope’s speech, we draw up a most-offended list, as the BBC has done, we find it further populated by the likes of a Saudi grand mufti, the Palestinian prime minister, an Iranian cleric, the head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and one of the world’s leading clubhouses for protecting terrorists, the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Palestinians hurl firebombs at churches, an Italian nun is shot in the back in a hospital in Somalia, and we are invited to ponder whether these deeds should be laid at the door of the Pope for giving a speech. What does it take for the democratic world to understand? With their constant demands for apologies — over cartoons, over speeches, over you-name-it — the chronically offended tyrants of our time, armed with guns and bombs, are on a very real offensive. Against us.

“Thousands Rally Against Pope Speech,” reports Al-Jazeera, citing as evidence of worldwide protest a march by about 2,000 offended Palestinians in the Gaza strip (so what’s new?), and quoting Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya as saying “The Pope should revise his comments and stop attacking Islam, which is the religion of more than 1.5 billion people.” This kind of billing may of course whip up more street protests. But at the moment, what’s really going on with these numbers? Even assuming, just to be generous, and for ease of calculation, that it was actually 3,000 Palestinians who marched, not just 2,000, then what Al-Jazeera is actually reporting is that worldwide, out of every one million Muslims, only about two have taken to the streets — repeat, 2 out of every 1,000,000.

Maybe the headline should have been: “About .0002% of World’s Muslims Rally Against Pope Speech.”

Remind me, why are we welcoming this roadshow of tyrants to New York? And I do mean welcoming, with Americans picking up the tab for the surrounding security, subsidizing their Turtle Bay watering hole, enduring their motorcade jams and contributing more than $5.3 billion of your tax dollars this year to the UN that is bringing them here to strut the world stage.

Warming up for next week’s grand jamboree of the UN General Assembly in Manhattan, more than 100 nations belonging to the “Non-Aligned Movement” have just held a summit in Cuba, starring Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Raul Castro, North Korean big-wig Kim Yong Nam, and — could any such gathering be complete without him? — the UN’s Kofi Annan.

Networking opportunities abounded, with Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reporting on a sideline meeting in which Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s delegate, Kim, eager to build on their lively cooperation to date in missile and bomb technology, urged that “mutual relations should expand in all fields.” Ahmadinejad went on to suggest that Latin America, and Colombia in particular, deserve to benefit from Iran’s nuclear bounty. And before traveling on to New York, he plans a pit stop in Venezuela, whose swaggering dictator, Hugo Chavez, used the Cuba conclave to rally support for his bid this season to join the UN Security Council (for more on how this kind of networking is catching on in American’s backyard, see Michelle Malkin’s terrific coverage of Hezbollah in Venezuela). Everyone who is anyone in modern tyranny, from Belarus to Zimbabwe to Syria, had a man (or woman) on the spot these past few days in Havana.

These are the stars of the “Non-Aligned” crew now heading for the UN mothership, whose Secretary-General Annan — apparently still too busy to disclose his personal finances (see posts below) — traveled to Havana to tell them all, in the concluding words of a speech that began with thanks to Fidel Castro, “for his enormous contributions,” that “I thank each and every one of you for the outstanding partnership we have enjoyed during the 10 years that I have served as Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Said Annan: “I could not have done it without your support.”

Noting that the United Nations is exempt from its own Convention on Corruption, Senator Tom Coburn writes to Kofi Annan today, urging Annan to “release your personal financial disclosure forms that you now require of your subordinates.”

Having bragged up his own conception of a new UN “Ethics Office,” now fielding financial disclosure forms required of senior UN staff (see second paragraph of this Jan. 17, 2006 UN press release) Annan has for months been dodging questions about whether he has filed one of his own.

(See posts below). Now we wait for Kofi’s answer…

There are loads of reasons why Kofi Annan should file a financial disclosure form, not least to set a good example for UN staff, and a precedent for the next Secretary-General.

But among the Annan-specific reasons, too many to detail here in full, let’s focus for the moment on the highly peculiar judgment Annan displayed this past February in accepting, along with the honors of Dubai’s Zayed environmental prize, a $500,000 purse . Annan finally announced he would relinquish the half-million bucks, but only after it came to light, more than two months later, that since receiving the prize he had appointed as head of the UN Environment Program a member of the prize jury – which also included two senior UN officials who already owed their jobs to Annan.

Annan never acknowledged that it is a conflict of interest for a sitting UN Secretary-General to personally accept big cash prizes, especially from high officials of UN member states. Nor does it appear that Annan has peopled his inner circle with folks inclined to keep him in check. His deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, advised him to take the prize money. With judgment like that in the UN executive suite, there’s a rich case to be made that Annan should disclose his finances — and not only to the UN “Ethics Office,” but to the public.

At the same UN press conference where he made his quip Wednesday morning about Kojo’s car (see post below), Kofi Annan was asked by a reporter whether –as required of all senior UN staff under his own “Ethics” reforms — he had filed a financial disclosure form.

Replied Kofi: “I honour all my obligations to the UN.”

Clever. The UN Secretary-General is above his own staff rules, so he is not actually obliged to submit the financial disclosure forms now required of his top staff (which, at the UN, hardly amount to real disclosure in any case, because they are not disclosed to the public; only to select UN officials).

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UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan held a press conference this morning at which a Los Angeles Times reporter tweaked him briefly “About that Mercedes… .”

To which Kofi Annan, before moving right along, replied, “I’ll give you a ride.”

There are reasons to wonder, as I’ve just been doing in a column for National Review Online, whether Kofi has already taken all of us for a ride.

The vehicle involved is the Mercedes on which Kofi Annan’s son, Kojo Annan, saved himself more than $20,000 in 1998 by buying and shipping the car to Ghana under use of the name and UN privileges of his father, Secretary-General Kofi Annan. News of this did not surface until September, 2005, at which point, with Times of London reporter James Bone in the lead, the press began asking questions. The UN stonewalled for months, and Kofi Annan finally blew up at Bone during a televised press conference last December. In January, Kojo Annan — via his lawyer — offered to pay the government of Ghana any customs duties owed on the Mercedes; the lawyer added that the car had been wrecked in an accident in late 2005, in Nigeria. With many questions still unanswered, but Kofi Annan saying the whole thing had nothing to do with the UN, and he considered the matter closed, the story faded from the news.

But how did this Mercedes, which arrived in Africa in the name of the UN Secretary-General, get from Ghana to Nigeria? UN documents show that the UN country representative in Ghana applied to register the car in the name of the UN Secretary-General. If the car changed hands after reaching Ghana in Kofi Annan’s name in 1998, are we to believe there was no UN record? If it crossed international borders, did it do so while registered to the Secretary-General? Has anyone seen an accident report? Has anyone seen this car?

Down the ages, there have been some mysteries so deep, so elemental, that they are destined never to be solved. But before we consign to that category the African journey of the Annan Mercedes, maybe someone out there can yet divine a few more more clues? Here are the papers released to the press this past January by Kojo Annan’s lawyer. Can anyone — in the words of an inspired headline published last December in The New York Sun, “Follow that Car” — ?

Those are the words of Karnit Goldwasser, who also spoke at yesterday’s Hudson conference on the UN (see post below). She is the wife of Ehud Goldwasser — one of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped July 12 into Lebanon by Hezbollah. She has already been to see the UN’s Kofi Annan (who has appointed a secret “facilitator” for what is supposed to be Hezbollah’s “unconditional” return of the Israeli hostages, but so far it seems all the UN facilitating has gone into glad-handing and appeasing Hezbollah, Syria and Iran).

On behalf of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, there have been no signs of urgency from Annan; no howls of righteous outrage from the otherwise verbose UN humanitarian emergency coordinater, Jan Egeland; and of course no visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Karnit Goldwasser has yet to receive any sign that her husband, or Regev, are even still alive.

So, agonizing though it must be, she continues to seek in other quarters the help that the UN promised but has not delivered. Speaking softly, briefly, she told us that back in Israel she and Ehud have “one dog and two cats,” that they had “big plans” for a life together, and that since he was kidnapped, “I don’t count the days, because for me, time stops.”