Rubin (author of a new book on “The Truth About Syria“) points out that the many concessions of today’s prevailing Western diplomacy reflect much the same mindset, that “the leaders of Hamas, Hizballah, Syria, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhoods, al-Qaida, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Sudan, etc., will no doubt be tamed, abandon public life, and go back to their homes.”

Nor has the Times changed its tune. Rubin quotes from a June 30th NYT editorial: “Few countries can afford the luxury of limiting their diplomacy to friendly countries and peace-loving parties.” (Note, just in case you missed it, Condi’s many carrots for Kim Jong Il reportedly include $2.5 million for the recent Potemkin show of blowing up the cooling tower at the aging Yongbyon reactor).

Why did UNICEF get into this game? According to Reuters, UNICEF spokesman Chris de Bono explained that blackisting Leviev is supposed to be all about limiting UNICEF’s partners and donors to folks who are “as non-controversial as possible.”

Oh really? That’s fascinating, coming from UNICEF, where the 36-member executive board — which is its governing body — currently includes the regimes of Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe.

These despotisms  (let’s say it again — UNICEF board members Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe) are all in flagrant violation of a whole array of the UN’s own resolutions, on matters as grave as nuclear proliferation and obscene violations of basic human rights. Their collective activities in very recent times have included slaughtering peaceful dissidents, torturing and jailing political opponents, plundering their own countries, blocking and manipulating UN emergency relief efforts, rigging elections, training and supporting terrorists and engaging in the illicit pursuit of nuclear bombs — accompanied by gloating threats to obliterate a nearby state.

Apparently — since all three are still listed as members of the board — UNICEF does not regard the governments of Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe as controversial. Either that, or UNICEF has two different standards: One that entails the blacklisting of Israeli would-be supporters that UNICEF has decided are not “as non-controversial as possible”; and another that provides seats on UNICEF’s governing board for some of the world’s nastiest tyrannies. That leaves us with two questions. Why on earth would Lev Leviev, or anyone else in the democratic world, want to support UNICEF at all? And who on the UNICEF governing board is busy deciding what is controversial, and what is not?  

For private players now doing business with other UN relief programs that benefit corrupt tyrants — say, Kim Jong Il, in North Korea — this lawsuit might just raise some colorful questions about the wisdom of assuming that because the UN enables it, it must be all right. On the contrary, unless the Secretary-General deigns to waive immunity, the UN and its staff don’t have to worry about being hauled into court. With its privileges and immunities, the UN deflects legal remedies like water off a greased pig’s back.

So, the incentives are for the UN to run rotten programs (because it can), while private players (or at least those who operate in countries with genuine rule of law) get stuck holding the bag. So, while we wait for more details of this Iraqi lawsuit to emerge, I start to wonder: What might happen if Kim Jong Il were to fall, and some of those currently hungry and oppressed North Koreans were to start combing through the leftover Pyongyang records? What would they conclude about how much UN aid actually went to the North Korean people, and how much helped sustain and pamper the regime of Kim Jong Il – and who among the private contractors recruited for these projects did handsomely out of the deal? And what might those North Koreans try to do about it?

There on the WFP board, seated alongside the likes of the U.S., U.K. and Japan, is the government of — you guessed it — Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. And he has interesting company. Also on the WFP board are Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba and Sudan. Is this really a good idea?

Before the EPA gets its hooks into regulating not simply crud, but the air itself, it’s time to dust off the 1984 movie, ”Ghostbusters,” in which the EPA (set up in 1970 under President Nixon) had already become such an intrusive, officious, bureaucratic joke that even Hollywood was willing to ridicule it.

Climate madness goes well beyond the EPA, of course. The same UN bureaucracy that brought us Oil-for-Food is now twitching to supervise Carbon-for-Cash. As ever, the chief beneficiaries are not likely to be the poor, the polluted, or the taxpayers and fee-payers who foot the bills, but UN and government officials and their cronies, who get to set up entire new domains of patronage and power.   

And what’s it all for, anyway? UN claims to the contrary, there is no scientific “consensus” on global warming.  Even among the scientists consulted by the Nobel-prize festooned IPCC, there is dissent (although the UN and the carbon-credit vendors prefer not to advertise that inconvenient fact). On the matter of which way the world’s ever-changing climate might now be heading, and why, there is still mystery enough so that trying to meter and regulate every carbon dioxide emission on earth is, ultimately, likely to go down in history as the most expensive, wasteful, dictatorial and  pseudo-scientific experiment since the Marx-Lenin-Stalin crusade to re-make human nature. (For some background on the climate front, scroll through the compilation on Senator James Inhofe’s environmental blog; and for a sample of the hypocrisy of the IPCC’s co-Nobelist, Al Gore, see this entry from my fellow Pajamas blogger Roger Kimball).

Wrong symbol. For years Kim Jong Il’s nuclear proliferation schemes have spread way beyond Yongbyon. We’ll know North Korea is serious about peace and disarmament when we start seeing TV broadcasts of North Koreans blowing up and knocking down those giant statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.  

The State Department wants a nuclear deal, President Bush wants a North Korea peace legacy. And like the hellbent bomber pilot played by Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, undeterred by any last whisper of sanity, oblivious to the realities of the situation, and apparently beyond the reach of any recall code, Condi Rice just keeps barreling on, homing in on that bull’s-eye moment, yeeee-hah! — oh, criminy, that ended in mushroom clouds. Well, this could too.

Condi, of course, is on a mission not to bomb Kim Jong Il, but to befriend him — although the diplomatic lingo of the State Department leans toward such group-hug oxymorons as “We expect North Korea to cooperate with us … .” In a Wall Street Journal Op-ed, “Diplomacy is Working on North Korea,” Condi has just made the announcement (much-telegraphed, and much-delayed by Pyongyang’s complete disregard for a previously announced deadline of Dec. 31, 2007) that North Korea “will soon make a declaration of its nuclear programs, facilities and materials.” When that happens, presto! President Bush will lift wartime trade restrictions on North Korea, and notify Congress that in 45 days he will remove North Korea from the list of terrorist-sponsoring states.

For a cherry on top, we can also expect later this week the televised demolition of a cooling tower at North Korea’s aging Yongbyon reactor complex. (How much is Kim Jong Il charging the visiting media and dignitaries for tickets to this event? Will anyone tell us?) This is to be the choreographed Kodak moment, peddled by State as the diplomatic triumph of North Korea’s nuclear facilities crumbling without a shot fired.

Except, what we’re really about to get is a Potemkin party, a charade for the evening news. The aging Yongbyon complex is crumbling in any event. This hoopla over the cooling tower is North Korea’s latest diversion from its real and alarming weapons drama and proliferation networks behind the scenes — entwined as convenient during Kim Jong Il’s reign with Pakistan, Libya, Iran, Syria and who-knows-what-else. For years already, Kim Jong Il has been busy diversifying his nuclear projects, including a uranium enrichment program (when confronted over this by the U.S. in 2002, North Korea confirmed it; then later denied it — go figure), and such outrages as the clandestine copy-Yongbyon nuclear reactor built with North Korean collaboration in Syria (destroyed by an Israeli air strike last September, but still secretly under construction as recently as last summer, when Kim’s government was making a big show of shutting down the original Yongbyon in North Korea).

And Condi, in her zeal to push her North Korean deal, managed to write her entire diplomacy-is-working Op-ed on the subject without any explicit mention of the mind-bending report that on the paper records of Yongbyon’s activity, turned over recently to the U.S. by North Korea, American analysts found, according to the Washington Post, traces of highly enriched uranium. Talk about gilding the plutonium — there seems to be so much weapons-related radioactive material wafting around North Korea that the North Koreans themselves can’t keep track of it.

Rice, presumably with a straight face, elides right past this awkward feature of North Korea’s filing system to posit that “Because of our current policy, we now know more about North Korea’s uranium-enrichment efforts than before, and we are learning more still — much of it troubling.” Hmmm… and with North Korea’s record of nuclear extortion, lies, deceit, cheating on every deal and chronic withholding of highly relevant information, how are “we” learning… well, whatever it is we’re learning? Is that because American analysts found themselves licking highly enriched uranium off their fingers as they flipped through North Korean paperwork? (Not least, one has to wonder, is this safe for the researchers? Just to pursue a little thought experiment here – if, for instance, detainees at Guantanamo Bay were asked to flip through these same North Korean documents, wouldn’t we hear an international outcry over the inhumane risks of such exposure?)

Condi argues that in the wheeling and dealing to date, America has given up nothing of significance. Uh-huh. Nothing, that is, except the spectacle of the world’s superpower dignifying Kim Jong Il by stooping to appease him; sending him 134,000 tons of free fuel; welcoming his negotiators for bilateral talks in New York; shrugging off his missed deadlines; watering down the conditions for a satisfactory nuclear declaration; hushing up for more than seven months the information that North Korea even while promising to come clean had continued helping Syria build a secret nuclear reactor; dismissing as a back-burner consideration Kim’s domestic slave labor gulag, and totalitarian rule; and promising in exchange for the radioactive tokens described above that America will lead the way in welcoming Kim’s regime of the Juche idea to the tables (and banking systems?) of the civilized world.

Oh, and let’s not forget the cash for Kim. To satisfy Kim’s demands (in which Pyongyang immediately upped the ante after agreeing to the February, 2007 nuclear disarmament deal), the U.S. arranged the transfer to North Korea last year of some $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds frozen at Banco Delta Asia in Macau — a transfer in which, as State Department envoy Chris Hill became increasingly insistent that Kim Jong Il get the money, the U.S. enlisted the Federal Reserve to move the cash to Kim. This was striking, not least, because North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury, has been counterfeiting U.S. currency for years. Kim Jong Il appears to understand the depth of this kow-tow he exacted from the U.S. — for all the world to see – in getting that money. Condi, Chris Hill and President Bush apparently remain clueless.

Condi concludes her op-ed by trying to cover the bases: “It may be the case that North Korea does not want to give up its nuclear weapons and programs. This is a real possibility. But we should test it… We believe that the six-party framework is the best way to learn more about the threat…,” etc. etc.

Test it? Secretary Rice thinks we should test whether Kim is really willing to be diplomatically inveigled out of his nuclear extortion and proliferation rackets. President Clinton, with Jimmy Carter as his muse, already tried that test – in that case as part of a four-way deal. Clinton threw into that pot a $5 billion plan under which an international consortium began building Kim two turnkey nuclear reactors, plus free fuel, plus a visit in 2000 from then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, wearing her best red dress. Kim cheated. Of course he cheated. Kim’s rule — and lavish lifestyle athwart his starving subjects — depends on maintaining his militarized state and nuclear extortion racket. If he loosened up enough to allow the serious beginnings of a normal economy and even moderately open society, there’s a good chance his own trampled and famished countrymen would seize the opening to hang him from the nearest Tower of the Juche Idea. 

It’s not just North Korea’s behavior that’s at issue here. It is also U.S. policy that’s being put to the test, in the eyes of every would-be nuclear-weapons proliferator on the planet — starting with Iran. The lesson to date is that America, faced with nuclear blackmail, will bow down, dignify and fortify tyrants, fork over loot, and celebrate the process as a victory for diplomacy. Were North Korea to detonate a nuclear bomb over Los Angeles tomorrow, I start to wonder if Condi Rice and Chris Hill would describe the cataclysm as “troubling” and then re-cast it as a candid and informative addendum to North Korea’s promised declaration of its nuclear program.  

Fresh from collecting yet another prize spun off by a UN-centric universe in which one of the chief activities seems to be giving each other awards (this one from the Central European University in Budapest, founded by Mark Malloch Brown’s former landlord, George Soros, who was on hand June 19 to share the stage) Kofi Annan will be hosting a “high-level” forum this Tuesday and Wednesday in Geneva. The theme is ”Climate Justice.” The guest list features the usual roster of “leaders from all sectors of society and from around the globe” — all, that is, except anyone who might vigorously disagree with the endless redistributionist schemes in which Kofi Annan & pals figure as the sacred arbiters of who gets what. (And, due to the vicissitudes of fate and that Oil-for-Food indictment issued last year in the U.S. Southern District, Benon Sevan — whom Kofi Annan once hand-picked as a natural for this sort of exercise — is unlikely to leave his native Cyprus to attend the Geneva festivities).

The event will include an evening “boat cruise and cocktail dinatoire on Lake Leman,” , courtesy of the Swiss government — the same Swiss government that has made available to Kofi’s foundation a deluxe villa next door to the UN’s palatial complex in Geneva (and the same Swiss government which enjoys quite a job mill on the back of the ever-expanding UN empire, retiree projects and affiliates). Perhaps such amenities are necessary to offset the heavy labors of fashioning rationing schemes for the planet — especially as ordinary taxpayers wake up here and there (check out the astounding graphic linked in this June 9 Wall Street Journal online piece by Pete Du Pont) to the reality that such schemes would cost trillions, and are far less likely to tame the world’s weather than to crash the global economy. That is a scenario in which the poorest people of the world would be well and truly and — yes – sustainably devastated, while Kofi & Co., gazing at the Swiss sunset over cocktails while cruising Lac Leman and crafting “Climate Justice,” would be among the least vulnerable. Nice work, if you can get it.

No such luck. What came across was such a muddle of priorities that the only real salvation may be to look to the blogosphere to sort this out. CBS is disturbed– and rightly so –by Al Hurra’s record of broadcasting the kind of propaganda it is meant to counter. But CBS is also disturbed – and wrongly so — by the notion that having created a taxpayer-funded Arabic TV channel to broadcast into the Middle East, the administration might actually want it to broadcast an American government line. So which is it? Is Al Hurra supposed to be an exercise in faithfully reflecting a U.S. government message — and let the audience make of it what they will? Or an exercise, never mind the resulting message, in wholesale subsidizing of select reporters to explore the frontiers of free speech?

On the tangle of personalities and allegations shown in this broadcast, I’ll defer to Joel Mowbray, who has invested considerable time in exploring this state-broadcasting labyrinth. In an article in The Wall Street Journal last year, he described as one of the chief villains in the subverting of Al Hurra’s original mission the same man, Larry Register, who unexpectedly popped up in the full-length “60 Minutes” piece as one of the saints. (Update: On Powerline, this morning, Mowbray — who knows in detail the who’s-who of this Washington turf war — slams CBS and says that Al Hurra since getting rid of Register has largely cleaned up its act. Good, but if anti-Israel rants like that aired last month are still slipping by under the U.S. government label and on the U.S. taxpayer dime, still not good enough).

Where I end up is much worried that until Washington does a better job of sorting out what interests Al Hurra is meant to loyally serve, and how, we would all be safer to unplug the taxpayer-funded broadcasting. I can see good reasons for a TV station that would beam into the Middle East, unapologetically, such illuminating material as Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” (over and over), and investigative pieces on the lavish living styles, London and Paris townhouses, and fat Swiss bank accounts of the Middle Eastern potentates who control so much of the Middle Eastern media. It’s a good bet that in-depth, well-documented reporting on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Tyrannical” would be watched with deep interest in the Middle East. I’m not hopeful that’s what lies ahead. In the real world, the question is what’s going to be going out over Al Hurra after the next U.S. election?