WELCOME - AT 6:58 A.M. ET:  We're happy to welcome an important new website, Planet Iran, guided by our friend, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi.  It's here.  The site will be the authoritative place to go for news about Iran, and especially its democracy movement. 

One of Planet Iran's first offerings is a brilliant essay by Claudia Rosett, one of the best UN reporters around.  Unlike the drab observers of the so-polite mainstream media, Rosett pulls no punches.  Consider her description of the UN itself, from the essay run by Planet Iran:

In practice, the United Nations is a messy, murky despot-infested collective - opaque, girdled in diplomatic immunities, and thus largely unaccountable for its actions. The biggest voting bloc in the General Assembly is the 130-member G-77, which this year picked for its chair - I'm not kidding - the genocidal government of Sudan (whose President Omar al-Bashir is under indictment by the International Criminal Court). 

Rosett writes of the fact that President Obama, in an act that demeans the presidency, comes direct from from an appearance on David Letterman this week to chair the UN Security Council on Thursday.  Rosett:

The five permanent members are democratic France, Britain, and the United States, plus despotic Russia and China. The current roster of 10 rotating members includes not only Japan and Austria, but Vietnam and Libya. This month it is America's turn to preside; Obama will sit in the same chair occupied in March by an envoy of Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. With heads of state summoned for Thursday's historic occasion, it's likely history will record the spectacle of terror-drenched tyrant-for-life Gadhafi sharing the table.

And...

In this setup, the most law-abiding of the 192 member states tend to get stuck with the results of whatever the Security Council agrees to. The most unscrupulous, which account to no electorates back home, feel free to lie as they please and do whatever they can get away with, which is plenty, because the United Nations leaves individual member states to police their own compliance with U.N. deals. From the oil-for-food scandal to the current sanctions-busting traffic with the likes of Iran and North Korea, it is common practice for some Security Council members to violate, with impunity, the same deals they vote for.

COMMENT:  Applause for Planet Iran for bringing us that column.  Applause for Claudia for writing it.

No applause for President Obama for honoring the UN, and giving respectability to thugs.

September 22, 2009