Here it comes — Party Week at this year’s opening of the United Nations General Assembly, complete with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe and the foreign ministers of Belarus, Burma, Syria and North Korea (although, with the UN’s practice of giving all 192 members a chance to speak, no matter whom they’ve butchered lately, it takes a full five days to mill through them all. So the last three in this particular Axis of Antediluvians — Burma, Syria and North Korea will bring up the tail-end of the speechifying, the following Monday).

And, of course, Obama, Obama, Obama and yet more Obama. Everything he does at the UN right now is — as his flaks have not been shy about letting us know — historic, if for no other reason than that – this being the first UN annual opening of his presidency — Obama himself has not done it before.

But, in the matter of full-body immersion, he’s about to do it now, with three days of  designer boots on the ground in NY. On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Obama will give a historic speak at the Secretary-General’s summit on climate change. Then he’ll host a historic lunch for high officials of Sub-Saharan Africa and attend what the U.S. Mission has described as a “climate change” dinner hosted (your tax dollars, and the UN’s historically high budgets, at work) by Ban Ki-Moon. Which, with Obama in attendance, augurs a lot more historic work toward what the UN would like to translate into historically high levels of regulation and expense affecting almost every aspect of your own daily life. But hey — how else can one make history?

Wednesday, Sept. 23, Obama will deliver what U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice says will be a “historic” address to the UN General Assembly. He’ll also host a meeting with the main patrons of the UN’s (historically corrupt) peacekeeping missions, and attend Ban Ki-Moon’s annual lunch for heads of state and government. That evening, together with Michelle, he’ll host a U.S. reception for the same (historically well-fed) bunch.

Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, the authors of The 9/11 Commission Report faulted America for failure of imagination. Our politicians have now remedied that. Imagination has become the calling and the cause of current U.S. politics.

We have a president who imagines he can keep this country safe by reaching out to Syria, haggling with North Korea and Iran, winking at Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and smiling at Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Washington is rife with politicians and pundits willing to entertain the idea that if America withdraws in defeat from Afghanistan, there will be no hell to pay.

Imagination now tells us that with the help of the United Nations, the politicians of the world can fine-tune the climate and the tides. Imagination says there can be state-planned healthcare for all, but rationing and deficits for none. Imagination says America can be centrally planned, but free; nanny-state, but strong; apologetically appeasement-driven, but secure. Imagination has reduced “war” to “overseas contingency operations,” and imagination posits that – Afghanistan apart — what remains of those overseas contingency operations can mostly be fought and won through the U.S. courts.

Meanwhile, the alarms are clanging. Signs are that Iran will soon be rolling out nuclear bombs. North Korea has already run its second nuclear test. New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau goes to Washington to warn an unheeding administration that a fast-rising “axis of unity” between Venezuela and Iran is on a path leading toward nuclear-tipped missiles in America’s “backyard.” Pirates, and freighters stuffed with North Korean weapons, ply the seas. Al Qaeda digs into Africa. Russia and China blaze the way toward a world order in which ruthless autocracy outranks democracy, and New York Times columnist  Thomas Friedman sees a certain charm in the idea. Later this month, an extraordinary parade of swaggering and emboldened tyrants — including Qaddafi, Chavez and Ahmadinejad– will arrive in New York to share the UN stage with the U.S. president who has already shaken hands with two of them, and wished happy new year, on webcast, to a third.

We don’t yet know on what date, precisely, the next terrible fruition of all these realities will rudely interrupt Washington’s orgy of imagination. For now, for a place marker, call that date Sept. 12th. In the reports that will later be written, it won’t be failure of imagination that should figure large. Rather, failure of cognition, and of will.

Your tax dollars at work. Again. From Voice of America — which is supposed to represent America to the world –   we’ve just had a Sept. 5 “news” story that reads like a press release from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Or maybe from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or both. Looks like they decide, VOA reports.

The headline is: “Chavez Meets with Ahmadinejad to Discuss Peaceful Nuclear Partnership.”

What’s wrong with that headline? It’s newsworthy — alarmingly so — that Iran and Venezuela are pursuing and publicly airing plans for a nuclear partnership. But who says that “peaceful” has anything to do with it? Well, Hugo Chavez said so. He said it during his visit this past weekend to Tehran, where he met with Ahmadinejad. The VOA reporter, Jessica Desvariaux, dateline Cairo, faithfully informs us in her lead paragraph that Chavez “said there is no proof that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a caveat, or a dissenting view about the many signs that Iran is obviously after the bomb. In this article, that doesn’t happen.

Instead, in the second paragraph, with the added detail that Chavez was “all smiles” and making his “seventh official visit to the Islamic Republic,” the VOA reporter repeats, word-for-word, her phrase from the first paragraph, that Chavez “said there is no proof that Iran is building is building a nuclear bomb.”

That’s followed by information that Chavez says Iran will not back down in its efforts to obtain what Chavez “says is a sovereign right of the people — to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.”

Finally we get to a thumbnail of American policy –  by now we’re in the fifth paragraph of the article — with a single sentence mentioning President Obama’s call for Tehran to engage in nuclear talks by late September, “or face further sanctions.”  But American concerns get exactly that lone sentence. Then the VOA reporter returns to what is apparently her usually scheduled programming, which now turns to paraphrasing, with nary a caveat, the propaganda of Tehran: “Iran denies that its nuclear program is a cover for a military nuclear program and insists that it’s for energy purposes.”

There are two more paragraphs, entirely devoted to paraphrasing Ahmadinejad’s statements that the aims of Iran and Venezuela are to support revolutionary nations, form and expand anti-imperialist fronts, and help oppressed nations.

The reporter then wraps up with the information that Chavez after a second day in Tehran would continue on to Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan and Spain. (She omits his earlier stops on this tour, in Syria, Libya and Algeria).

This is interesting material, in its way, including the mention in the fourth paragraph that Chavez said the mission of his visit was for Iran and Venezuela to create a “nuclear village.” Perhaps the Americans who would be within range of Venezuela’s piece of this village might have some thoughts about that. Perhaps the Israelis and a number of Arab states within range of the Iranian portion of this endeavor might see it as less than “peaceful.” There is actually quite a story buried in here somewhere, about transcontinental cooperation on sanctions-busting nuclear projects, involving a predatory Latin American regime, and a terrorist-sponsoring state where peaceful protesters were recently slaughtered in the streets. But this VOA article is almost entirely devoted to repeating and paraphrasing the utterances of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Couldn’t this brand of coverage be left to the propaganda organs of Caracas and Tehran? Why should American taxpayers fund it? And even more to the point, exactly how does it serve American interests for VOA to disseminate it?

The reporter, Desvariaux (she has an online resume here), appears relatively new to VOA. In a search of the VOA web site, I found only two articles with her byline. But the trend isn’t good. Here she is, Sept. 6, dateline Cairo, providing for Khalid Mashaal, leader of the Hamas terrorist group that controls Gaza, the same public-relations genre of coverage she provided Sept. 5 for Chavez and Ahmadinejad. If this is Voice of America, it’s time for Iran, Venezuela and Hamas to start complaining to Washington about plagiarism.

Have a look at the web site of their Iran office, which has been soliciting donations for use in terror-sponsoring Iran and for relief for terrorist-controlled Gaza through an Iranian state-owned bank, Bank Melli. (Caveat: If you live in America, Australia or a country in the European Union, it is illegal to donate to the account listed on the UNICEF site).

Bank Melli is under sanctions by the U.S., the European Union and Australia for what might basically be called proliferation banking. The U.S. Treasury describes Bank Melli as having “facilitated numerous purchases of sensitive materials for Iran’s nuclear and missile programs on behalf of UN-designated entities.” Treasury adds that Bank Melli has also “provided a range of financial services to known proliferators, including letters of credit and the maintenance of accounts.”

The UN itself, in its series of sanctions resolutions on Iran, called on all member states in March, 2008 to “exercise vigilance” over any ties between financial institutions on their turf and Bank Melli. More on this in my Forbes.com column this week on “UNICEF’s Proliferation-Prone Banker.”

Does UNICEF’s American executive director, Ann Veneman — former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture –  see any problem with this arrangement? When I asked, earlier this week, she was unavailable for comment.

This comes alongside another disturbing UN solicitation for relief funds for terrorist-controlled Gaza, which turned up earlier this year under a photo of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Ban was advertising an emergency appeal by UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). That appeal included a special account for donations from Syria  – via a Syrian Bank that’s been under U.S. sanctions since 2004, the Commercial Bank of Syria (which Treasury alleges has provided banking services to terrorists, and during the days of the UN Oil-for-Food program served as a conduit for Saddam Hussein to launder a torrent of illicit loot).

Is there a pattern here? We have at least two UN agencies – UNICEF and UNRWA – picking some very disturbing bankers, especially in the fraught matter of transferring funds from terrorist-sponsoring Iran and Syria into Gaza, which is controlled by the terrorist group, Hamas. These are just two instances I happened to come across while looking at UN web sites which actually provided a detail or two of their banking arrangements, because they were soliciting money through the accounts.  As a rule, UN banking setups are not remotely transparent, and we are left to trust UN officials who assure us they are … trustworthy. What else is going on with the opaque and diplomatically immune banking arrangements of the vast web of UN agencies operating in the Middle East?

The UN record of accountability and due diligence is abysmal (Oil-for-Food, we were once assured — as UN officials tried to deflect initial calls for an investigation – was the most audited UN program ever). The UN agencies answer to governing bodies stacked with the likes of Iran, Cuba, Sudan, China, Russia and Libya. In the parade of dictators due to traipse through the General Assembly opening in New York later this month — including Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — we’re about to get a further display of the character of the UN. Who, these days, is keeping an eye on the UN’s far-flung bank accounts?

Yes, there are a number of disturbing things which could fit under that heading, including such unsavory items as Iran’s nuclear bomb program. And for reasons not fully explained in the public relations materials, you can also find this trio on the 26-member organizing committee of the latest in the endless series of United Nations climate conferences, this one meeting right now in Geneva, Aug. 31-Sept. 4.

Billing itself as “Not just another climate conference,” this gathering is crammed with the usual UN has-beens, wannabes and hangers-on, including former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and many of the same UN climate crowd whose deep interests in rationing your use of energy have, of course, required that they jet around the world — much of that at public expense — to climate conferences in recent years in venues from Rio to Bali. Some 1,000 “decision-makers and scientists“ from more than 150 countries have signed up to attend. It’s all part of the UN effort to build momentum for the “seal the deal” Copenhagen climate pow-wow scheduled for December.

For the current conference, the ambitions include… well, see what sense you can make of this UN-speak, which translated into English means, roughly, that the UN wants license to intrude in virtually every aspect of human life, oversee monumental wealth transfers around the globe, and effectively bill you for the experience.

Attuned, perhaps, to criticisms that there is a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in UN conferences that entail hundreds of people jetting in for a week of dining, wining and filling the plush hotels, the conference organizers have included in their materials some suggestions for making their conclave “more climate friendly.” This includes the reminder, “Don’t forget to turn the light off when you leave the room.” Actually, that could stand as a motto for the entire endeavor. All over the world, if this UN campaign gets any more traction, a lot of lights are going to go out. It’s happened before, and there’s a name for it: The Dark Ages. For that, perhaps it makes some sense to have the governments of Russia, China and Iran on the organizing committee.

It has the makings of the opening sequence in an apocalyptic thriller. A ship enters the Gulf, carrying a secret, illicit cargo of munitions, bound for Iran from North Korea. The ship is seized by the United Arab Emirates, where authorities discover that instead of the oil boring equipment listed on the manifest, the cargo includes some 10 containers filled with rocket launchers, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and detonators.

The UAE seizes the cargo and notifies the United Nations Security Council. But for weeks, the public is told nothing about it – not by the UN, and not by Washington. The event remains cloaked in silence, the ship is sent on its way. Finally, an unnamed diplomat leaks the information to the Financial Times, and the story starts to emerge… 

Except this is no fantasy. This is the latest news out of the web connecting totalitarian, nuclear North Korea with the messianic, terrorist-sponsoring, nuclear wannabe regime of Iran. And here we go again.

The story about this North Korean arms shipment broke August 29th in the FT, and in the short time since we have been hearing slightly more — but not nearly enough. This North Korean shipment underscores huge and troubling questions about what else is going on inside the tangled web of clandestine deals with which the world’s tyrannies are busy these days — arming each other, supporting each other, and fueling their killing machines while western diplomats jaw-jaw about “engagement” and “mutual respect.”

And what a web it is. There’s a good summary of the scene on Hot Air . Both North Korea and Iran are under multiple UN sanctions, meant to stop their nuclear proliferation programs. This shipment offers a terrific example of how rogue countries try to dodge such sanctions. The ship was Australian, controlled by a French conglomerate, registered in the Bahamas, with the actual shipment, according to Reuters, “arranged by the Shanghai office of an Italian company.” So, in the middle of this clandestine arms deal is a crazy quilt of countries, businesses and legal jurisdictions, apparently involving Australia, France, the Bahamas, Italy and China — all with North Korea on one end and Iran on the other (Iranian authorities are now denying that this shipment was coming their way. These are the same folks who say their nuclear program is just for electricity). So, what else is out there right now, on the high seas, on land, or in the air, bearing false labeling and traveling the back alleys of global commerce?

The Wall Street Journal reports that “according to people familiar with the seizure,” there was “no nuclear-related material” found on board. Should we trust such unnamed sources? Who are they, and why are they unnamed? Recall the case of the secret nuclear reactor nearly completed by Syria, with North Korean help, modeled on North Korea’s Yongbyon complex. That reactor was destroyed two years ago, in September, 2007, by an Israeli air strike. But from a Bush administration intent at the time on trying to consumate a deal in which North Korea would denuclearize in exchange for loads of U.S. aid and concessions, the truth was covered up until the following April — leaving the public in the dark for more than half a year about the incriminating evidence of both North Korea’s proliferation racket, and its duplicity at the negotiating table.

From the United Nations, source of so many wonders, we now have word that “The past is no longer a good indicator of the future.”

So says Michel Jarraud, the French head of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, opining about climate change at a press briefing in Geneva. Jarraud, who is part of the UN gang pushing for a multi-trillion dollar attempt to re-engineer the climate of the planet, seems to believe our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world of unswerving certainties about the future — possessed of all the relevant facts and armed with collated crop statistics. Today’s uncertainty about the future, he said, “Is something completely new — to make decisions not on facts or statistics about the past, but on the probabilities for the future.”

Really? Given the ever-changing nature of life itself, along with the climate and a great many other factors that interact their way into the future, one might suspect the human race has always kept in mind some sort of running tab of probabilities. It’s called evolution and adaptation. In places where individuals have had the freedom to invent, experiment and profit in the marketplace from their insights, mankind has racked up a spectacular record of dealing with these probabilities – creating out of raw wilderness an environment in which Michel Jarraud can sit in air-conditioned comfort, well-housed, richly fed and sounding off to the international media.

But what’s Jarraud’s answer to all this uncertainty he now predicts? You guessed it — he wants the UN to plan the future for you. To this end, in the approach to the grand climate jamboree scheduled for Copenhagen this December, the UN is convening yet another in its endless series of conferences, this one to be held next week in Geneva and attended by what Reuters describes as “About 1,500 policy-makers, researchers and corporate leaders.” (For these UN hunter-gatherers, there is of course endless justification for the jet fuel, carbon emissions and meat entrees they would like to ration to the rest of us).

I’m guessing that what Jarraud was trying to say, in his odd locutions about past and future, is that he thinks there has been a shift in the weights one should assign to various factors and probabilities. Fair enough. But here’s one prediction I’m willing to hazard, based on the past: In the long record of mankind peering into sheep entrails and sniffing the wind to try to divine the future, it would be hard to find a process more self-serving, politicized and potentially, abusively expensive for mankind than what the UN will try to deliver in months ahead, in the name of its bureaucratic absolutisms on “climate change.”

In the current western mood of coddling terrorists and pandering to tyrants, the perversions by now appear endless. On “compassionate grounds,” Scotland has just allowed the terminally ill Libyan terrorist, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, to return to Libya.  Convicted of murder in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Scotland, al-Megrahi was flown home Thursday to a hero’s welcome, transported by private jet, and met by Saif Gaddafi, son of Muammar Gaddafi — who along with his international terror sprees in years past has tyrannized Libya for 40 years.

If you’d like to learn more about the freed terrorist, al-Megrahi, and why Gaddafi might be so pleased to have him back, there’s an illuminating article on Forbes.com, written just before al-Megrahi’s release: “Don’t Let The Lockerbie Bomber Go Free.”

The author, Mohamed Eljahmi, had an older brother, Fathi Eljahmi, who was Libya’s most prominent democratic dissident. I say “was,” because after five solid years of imprisonment by Gaddafi, Fathi Eljahmi died this past April. There was no compassion shown by Gaddafi of any kind. Isolated much of the time, held in filthy conditions, incarcerated for a long stretch in a Libyan “psychiatric” facility, Fathi Eljhami was deprived of adequate medical care, and blocked from any direct communication with the outside world. He deserved a hero’s salute from both the democratic world and his fellow Libyans, but Gaddafi saw to it that from the day Eljahmi was arrested in 2004 until the day he died in April, 2009, he was never seen or heard in public again.

Gaddafi, however, has been living it up as the “rehabilitated” ruler of Libya. And next month he is expected to turn up at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where on the opening day of the debate, Sept. 23, he is currently listed as the next speaker in line after President Barack Obama. At the same UN gathering, Gaddafi will have even more to celebrate — Libya, in the person of one of Gaddafi’s former foreign ministers, Ali Treki, will take over the 2009-2010 presidency of the UN General Assembly. What’s next for Gaddafi and his henchmen? The Nobel Prize?

Websurfing to Caracas…

It happens to all of us – with reports just out that American life expectancy has hit an all-time high, I finally felt I had to go look at the titanic health care bill for myself. You go to the THOMAS web site, punch in H.R. 3200, and there it is — all 1,017 gory unintelligible pages of the nationalized, centrally planned future that President Obama and his chief comrades in Congress wish for us all (if not for themselves).

I began browsing this thing, and found it reminded me in so many ways of the products of the old Soviet Gosplan that in a fit of nostalgia I turned to Russia’s Itar-Tass wire. There one finds all sorts of odd items, including the news that while President Obama is tying America in knots over health care, fishy emails, and whatnot, Venezuelans have been having much more fun. Venezuela recently concluded a “Week of South Ossetia,” – celebrating solidarity with the Georgian breakaway republic that became the pretext for the Russian invasion of Georgia last year.

Anthems were played, Russian “politologists and diplomats” took part with Latin American “leaders,” and America was slammed by all. It seems that Obama’s extended hand, and even his handshake, have not done much to endear him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who recently described Obama as “lost in the Andromeda” galaxy.

How does this connect? The real threat to American health does not reside within our current health care system. Obama — no kidding — would do better to spend time worrying about things like South Ossetia week in Venezuela, or Hugo Chavez’s impending visit to Iran.

Questions about nepotism are turning up again at the United Nations, and they go all the way to the top.  

This tale involves Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s youngest daughter, Ban Hyun Hee, and her husband, Siddarth Chatterjee. When Ban took over the UN’s top job from Kofi Annan in January, 2007, both Hyun Hee and Siddarth Chatterjee were working for UNICEF out of Nairobi. Some UN observers, myself included (”Uh-Oh, Shades of Kojo“), raised concerns about this at the time — especially when Ban’s office refused to disclose details about the terms of his daughter’s and son-in-law’s UN employment. Given the scandals that beset Kofi Annan over the UN-related dealings of his son, Kojo Annan (the Oil-for-Food Cotecna inspections contract; the Mystery Mercedes …), it would have been prudent for Ban Ki-Moon and his family to make a huge effort to avoid even the appearance of any possibility of nepotism.

But here we go again. Thanks to Matthew Russell Lee of the Inner City Press, we now learn that during Ban’s tenure, his son-in-law, Siddarth Chatterjee, has been rising rapidly at the UN, with almost no details or explanation disclosed. From UNICEF in Nairobi, Chatterjee moved on to become chief of staff to Ban’s Special Representative for Iraq. From there, Chatterjee recently beat out more than 120 applicants for a high-level UN job in Copenhagen, as the regional director for Europe and the Middle East of the UN Office for Project Services, or UNOPS. (UNOPS is a UN “entity” which provides technical and administrative support to UN projects worldwide — $1.5 billion worth in 2007 alone).

Ban’s daughter, thanks to a UNICEF contract, has been able to join her husband in Copenhagen, though as reporter Matthew Russell Lee notes,  “Throughout the UN system, Inner City Press has met spouses who are unable to obtain jobs in the same city, country or even continent.”

What qualified Chatterjee for the promotions? What employment rank does he now hold? How much is he getting paid? How did Ban’s daughter get lucky enough to land a UN slot alongside her husband in Copenhagen? Lee has been asking questions, and reports that neither UNOPS nor Ban’s office has been giving answers. Instead, Lee has had to eke out details from internal UN emails leaked to him by whistleblowers who ask for anonymity, due to fear of retaliation (a well-founded fear, after Ban threw UN Development Program whistleblower Tony Shkurtaj to the dogs during the UNDP’s 2007-2008 North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal).

You can read the leaked emails about Ban’s son-in-law, and Lee’s discussion of the scene, in Inner City’s August 14 story: “UN’s Ban Expects Nepotism Report Aug 18, As His Daughter’s and Son in Law’s Promotion Questioned.”�