By Claudia RosettWith Iran racing down the homestretch toward a nuclear bomb, the United Nations Security Council has spent more than two years expressing "serious concern." By now, Iran is under U.N. sanctions, and in flagrant violation of five Security Council resolutions demanding that it stop enriching uranium. If anything, as a chronic abuser of the U.N. charter, Iran's despotic, terrorist-backing, nuclear-wannabe regime ought to qualify for expulsion from the 192-member U.N. At the very least, one might suppose that on U.N. premises, Iran would be something of a pariah. But at the U.N., that's not how it works. Although Iran lost its bid this year for a seat on the 15-member Security Council, Iran's government has the U.N. so well-wired, in so many ways, that it's hard to find an angle Iran is not busy exploiting. That ought to be of serious concern to President-elect Obama, who has promised to give the U.N. a far bigger role in U.S. policy.
As it is, America provides the main U.N. premises in New York, suffers the related traffic jams and tries to ride herd on the alleged spies (two Iranian guards at Iran's U.N. Mission in Manhattan were deported in 2004, after they were seen filming landmark buildings and parts of the transportation system). American taxpayers bankroll roughly one-quarter of the U.N.'s total budget, now swollen to well over $20 billion, and on top of that look likely to get stuck with the $2 billion-plus tab for the renovation now underway of U.N. headquarters. Meanwhile, Iran, which pays a paltry 0.18% of the U.N.'s core budget, or less than 1/100th of the U.S. contribution, has wangled itself an astounding array of influential U.N. slots, which by next year will include seats on the governing bodies of at least eight prominent U.N. agencies. That setup serves both to legitimize the same Iranian regime that is busy violating the U.N. charter, and gives Iran a say in how billions in U.N. funds--much of that money supplied by U.S. taxpayers--get spent around the world.
For a glimpse of this setup, you don't have to wait for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annual rant on the U.N. General Assembly stage. All you have to do is stroll through the main visitors' lobby of the landmark U.N. building in Manhattan. In that lobby, by far the most prominent display is a row of eight portraits, framed in gold, and showing the lineup of secretaries-general from the U.N.'s founding at the end of World War II, through the current Ban Ki-Moon. But these are no ordinary portraits. Each is actually a silk carpet, and under the woven picture of each secretary-general, there appears the woven inscription: "Presented by the Islamic Republic of Iran." The first seven of these carpets were accepted from Iran en masse by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1997. The eighth, depicting Ban Ki-Moon, was accepted by Ban last year and placed beside the others. And though the U.S. State Department seems oblivious to this use of the U.N. lobby as a showcase for Iranian gifts tailored to flatter the secretariat's top boss, it's a good bet that both the Iranian delegates and Ban are aware, when they look at those rug-portraits, that beneath the name of each secretary-general is inscribed the name of Iran's Islamic Republic.
But that's just the lobby. Next year, Iran is slated to begin a three-year term on the 36-member executive board of the U.N.'s flagship agency, the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP. The UNDP fields a presence in 166 countries and disperses some $9 billion around the globe every year--$5 billion from its own budget, and another $4 billion on behalf of other U.N. operations. The UNDP is the agency that early last year, when North Korea was rounding out a term on its board, became embroiled in the cash-for-Kim scandal--in which it turned out that the UNDP, in violation of its own rules, had been serving both as a source of hard cash for the rogue nuclear state of North Korea and as a money laundering vehicle for North Korean weapons and nuclear proliferation networks.