In the same week that bomb-happy Iran claims it is enriching uranium on an industrial scale, the UN reelects Iran as — guess what? — a Vice-Chairman of the UN Disarmament Commission. Writing on NRO, Anne Bayefsky has the full report, including a related sidelight, quoting UN Human Rights Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba (the same UN-ocrat who recently tried to stifle Hillel Neuer of UN Watch) on his Council’s decision “to discontinue the consideration of the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran” — this while Iran on top of its chronic domestic repression and abuse was holding British hostages.

These are just a sampling of the latest items in the UN’s own industrial-scale production of You-Couldn’t-Make-This-Up Orwellian moments. For which, as Senator Tom Coburn details here, American taxpayers pay billions all told, including millions for the Disarmament Commission and Human Rights Council.

It was bad enough watching the captured British sailors and marines cavorting on camera with Iran’s Ahmadinejad. But New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has now outdone them, entirely of his own free will. While visiting North Korea this week, Richardson compliantly allowed himself to be escorted by North Korean officials on an anti-American propaganda tour of the USS Pueblo — the U.S. navy ship hijacked by North Korea in 1968, along with its crew. According to the AP, Richardson described this tour as “a lot of propaganda” but justified going along with it on grounds that “we’re guests here.”

This is Richardson’s sixth trip to North Korea, and you can see why Kim Jong Il just loves to let him visit. With guests like that, who needs hostages?

Does the UN ever learn? To advertise a 2007 media fellowship, the UN Development Program has produced an eight-page pamphlet with a cover (pasted alongside this post) depicting smiling children, singing and playing musical instruments. And what are the singing children wearing? Why, the red scarves of the Young Pioneers, youngest tier of the ruling, repressive, murderous, totalitarian Workers’ Party of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea.

The UNDP provides no identifying caption. But if this photo wasn’t lifted straight from the propaganda bins of Pyongyang, it might just as well have been. For visitors to North Korea, one of the standard stops on the chaperoned propaganda tour is a visit to the Palace of Pioneers, where privileged, performing schoolchildren, wearing these same red scarves and singing odes to the Dear Leader, are trotted out to praise Kim’s regime.

What’s doubly rich about this UNDP pamphlet, linked here, (and downloaded here, in case it now somehow vanishes from the UNDP site), is that the theme for this UNDP “media advocacy” fellowship is supposed to be “Corruption.” For that, you might suppose the UNDP would be trying to encourage the development of an independent press. But no. From the description, this fellowship seems to be mainly about co-opting the media to advertise the UNDP. Media professionals from “developing countries” in the Asia-Pacific region — including North Korea, home of the utterly unfree press — are invited to apply, as long as they can provide evidence of “assured placement of final product in mainstream media” and “the final media product will become the property of UNDP and UNDP will be recognized in the output.” And whose money will help pay for this? Why yours, of course — at least if you are a taxpayer in the U.S., which slathers money all over the UN system, including the UNDP.

So, in the name of fighting corruption, we have a North Korean propaganda photo of singing young pioneers bedecking the cover of a UNDP pamphlet advertising a “media advocacy” fellowship offering financial support plus travel costs for work that will promote the UNDP. There are echoes here of the project launched in 2004 by former UNDP chief Mark Malloch Brown, in which the UNDP — which is supposed to use its funds for development — paid more than $500,000 for a historian to write and publish a paean to the UNDP.

This latest UNDP media pitch comes in a season in which the UNDP is under investigation for allegedly funneling hard cash to Kim Jong Il’s regime, while allegedly concealing for more than a decade counterfeit cash dispensed by a state bank in Pyongyang.

Maybe it’s time to rename the UNDP, which too often seems to function less like a development program than an agency for UN Dictators & Propaganda.

That’s all that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got from her visit to Syria — where it’s fun to shop in the souk. The price of this brand of diplomacy is that Bashar Assad got a house-call from the third-highest-ranking elected official of the United States. Here’s a link to my column today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on dignifying the despot.

Ahmadinejad has announced his “gift” of releasing the 15 British hostages. But somehow, amid all the hand waving and celebrating, they are still in Tehran — and instead of flying out on the day of their release, they are now expected to leave Thursday. So why the holdup?

Maybe Ahmadinejad wants to have his tailors whip up a few more suits for the departing sailors, or maybe he had to fill out a whole stack of Iranian hostage-crisis paperwork — But whatever the official reasons, here’s the effect:

The news is breaking today, and officials in London and Washington, along with the families, friends and colleagues of the hostages, are being asked to comment right now. The hostages are, in theory, free. But as long as they are still in Iran, there has to be that lingering worry about uttering anything that might cause a hitch — anything truly blunt, honest and potentially disagreeable to those twitchy, terrorist-backing kidnappers ruling Iran. And so, instead of complete howling outrage from the Free World – which is what we ought to be hearing — this episode is now subsiding into a welter of cautious thanks and gratified comments. That’s what the record will now show. This is a hostage-politics coda that already sounds like prelude to the next crisis.

Here’s a chart that Iran’s oh-so border-conscious Revolutionary Guards & Affiliates won’t show you. No, that red dotted line along the Iranian coast is NOT the route of British Royal Navy ships violating Iran’s territorial waters. It is the route taken by oil smugglers doing illicit, lucrative, sanctions-busting business with Saddam Hussein during the era of UN sanctions on Iraq.

The chart comes from the 2004 Duelfer report on Iraq, and the accompanying text explains that one of the routes used by Saddam’s UN-sanctioned regime to smuggle out oil was along the Iranian coast. And who was enabling this smuggling? Why, “the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy,” of course! –which “facilitated this illicit trade in return for a fee.”

Charles Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group calculated that Iran got a 25% cut of the profits from all Iraqi oil smuggled along this route. Duelfer noted that Iran and the UAE were the most frequent destinations for this smuggled Iraqi oil, and “the majority of the smuggling vessels were owned by entities from these countries.” In other words, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards turned a neat profit by offering Iran’s territorial waters as a corridor for the sanctions-busting traffic of Iranian and UAE smugglers allegedly doing dirty business with Saddam.

The 15 British hostages now held by Iran were patrolling near Iranian waters in an attempt to stop the current smuggling of Iraqi oil. And although the evidence shows that British patrols have NOT been violating Iran’s territorial waters, the chart above is enough to suggest that in a saner world, they really should — with the full help and blessing of the international community.

You know we’re following the wrong game plan when the threats of Iran’s rulers are more credible than the response of our own politicians. Tehran is racing ahead with its illicit nuclear bomb program; training, funding and backing terrorists; subverting with mayhem and murder the dearly won openings for democracy in Lebanon and Iraq; and has been advertising its aims of annihilating Israel and destroying the United States. To all this, we have replied with words, words, words.

It’s now 10 days since Iran seized 15 British hostages at gunpoint, and to this latest act of war, we have replied with “disgust” (Tony Blair), “grave concern” (UN Security Council) and by scolding Iran’s regime for “inexcusable behavior” (George Bush). The European Union probably said something as well, but it was not audible over the ka-ching of cash registers as the EU refused to back Britain’s call to freeze its $28 billion export trade with Iran.

Our politicians have spent so much time arguing themselves into the absurd and dangerous position that there can be no military response to Iran that by now — despite the trillions spent on our military and munitions — they seem to believe it. Tehran’s rulers have every reason to believe that they face enemies who for all practical purposes, and despite any number of maneuvers in the Gulf, field no force that will strike Iran itself.

Forgotten in all this is yet another hostage crisis — one that has now stretched on for more than eight months, involving the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped last July by the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah. They are still missing, and despite a UN Security Council resolution requiring their unconditional return, no one has called Hezbollah’s terror-masters in Iran to account.

We are left with such joke measures as watered-down UN “sanctions” on Iran. We are left with the U.S. Treasury trying gamely to track down and stop the flow of Iranian terror and WMD money, even as State undercuts even this by staging a preemptive grand giveaway of crime-tainted millions to North Korea’s bomb-testing Kim Jong Il — who while tallying his income from missile sales to Tehran must be watching Iran’s latest hostage parade with bemusement.

If this is the most the Free World will do in its own defense, then there is perhaps one measure more useful than spouting more words, words, words. Tehran is already more than familiar with the usual hostage-crisis script, as first played out on Jimmy Carter’s watch. Our politicians, if they truly have no will to act, should have the wisdom to shut up. In silence, Iran’s rulers might to our own advantage at least read the possibility –however misleading — that we are done with talk, and instead considering a real response.