Did they dock in Syria, or didn’t they? Last week, two Iranian war ships, a destroyer and a supply ship, passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. According to Iran’s government, they docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. According to the U.S. government, they did no such thing.

More specifically, on Saturday Iran’s state-owned PressTV reported that the two Iranian vessels had docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman, George Little, told the press, “We have absolutely no indication whatsoever the Iranian ships ever docked in Syrian ports.”

What’s going on here? One day there are two Iranian ships docking in Syria. Three days later, it seems that, like the Flying Dutchman, they never made port. Whatever they did during their swing through the eastern Mediterranean, they are now reported as having left the area, heading back through the Suez Canal.

These are not phantoms, or flyspecks invisible to the hi-tech eye. These are ships, substantial objects, which the U.S. certainly has the ability to track. I can’t claim to know what actually happened, and, alas, I have no inside sources here. So this is pure speculation. But it sounds as if the Iranian ships were indeed heading for Tartus,  and then ran into some reason to back off — leaving the Iranian government to  bluster that the ships had docked, rather than admit they’d chickened out.

If so, what might have blocked those ships? We know this much: There was no “Freedom Flotilla” launched from, say, Turkey, to try to deflect the arrival of Iranian war ships potentially stuffed with supplies for the terror-sponsoring regime of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, now using heavy weapons against his own people. There was no naval blockade mandated by, say, the United Nations, where China and Russia are now blocking any Security Council resolution on Syria. There was no grand effort put forth by the combined naval forces of the Arab League.

Assuming that something, or someone, intervened in some way to persuade those ships to wave off, that was good work. I’d like to think that the deciding factor was a sharp warning from the U.S. —  though if that was the case, it would have been far better had America found a way to deter Iran before those ships ever entered the Suez Canal. Or, as with too many showdowns on the front lines of Tehran’s aggression, was the job, and the risk, left to the Israelis?

And if the Tartus docking was an Iranian lie, it does not obviate the fact that Iran’s regime felt free to send war ships through the Suez Canal for the second time in a year, and this time felt free to boast they’d docked in Syria. Within the propaganda fog are real ships, real guns, real threats. What next?

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How hard was it for the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly to vote in favor of Thursday’s resolution condemning human rights violations in Syria? The violations are obvious, and horrific. Since last March, Syria’s regime under dictator Bashar al-Assad has been trying to exterminate open dissent by jailing, torturing, shooting, and shelling its own citizenry. With the Syrian government using heavy weapons against its own people, the death toll is now estimated at roughly 7,000.

If any of the UN’s member states had hesitations over the details of the resolution, which calls for Assad to make way for a peaceful transition to a democratic and pluralistic system, they could comfort themselves that General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding.

The resolution passed, by a vote of 137 to 12, with 17 abstentions (and the remaining 27 presumably out to lunch). By standards of the UN General Assembly, that’s a triumph. But it still means that with Syria’s totalitarian regime trying to keep its dynastic grip on power by murdering its own people by the thousands, 29% of the members of the UN General Assembly could not bring themselves to condemn the process.

That’s quite bad enough. But then there are the dozen states that didn’t just abstain, or duck out of the room, but actively voted against the resolution. The UN, as far as I can discover, has not yet gotten around to posting the voting record. But the BBC has done us the favor of providing a roster. One of those states is Syria itself, which is represented at the UN by the same regime that is butchering its own people — and among its international depredations boasts a horrendous record of terrorist bombings and other variations on murder in Lebanon and Iraq, and support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, in Gaza and Lebanon.

On the next page is the full dirty dozen, on this voting roll of dishonor:

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The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program, Achim Steiner.)

But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, and election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.

As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Now, Fox News Executive Editor George Russell reports that Ban Ki-Moon, Sha Zukang and another two dozen or more of the UN’s top Rio+20 planners held a closed-door retreat last October, at a Long Island mansion, where they discussed how Rio+20 could help them reshape the world. The proceedings were meant to be secret (apparently, UN top managers prefer that the world not know the details until their world reshaping is already well underway). But Russell got hold of the confidential minutes of the discussions, which are linked in his story, “UN chief, aides, plot ‘green economy’ agenda at upcoming summit.”

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You remember the U.S. sentinel drone that went down over Iran in December? President Obama asked Iran to send it back. According to the Russian RT news site, Iran — via the Swiss embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Tehran — is now sending President Obama a toy model of the American drone, colored bright pink.

Stories about this mocking gesture have been bubbling up for a while. In January the Christian Science Monitor reported that an Iranian toy-maker had begun turning out these model U.S. stealth drones in vivid hues. They come mounted on stands engraved with one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s slogans, still a pet sentiment of the Tehran regime: “We will trample America under our feet.”

Mockery is of course nothing new in these realms, and the Christian Science Monitor story included some details suggesting that this mockery of the U.S. could backfire on the Iranian regime itself. The toy models have been selling for the equivalent of about $4, which is no small sum for many Iranians, in a country where the oil-fed tyranny of the mullahs has warped and stunted the economy, and sanctions are now applying added pressure. The Monitor quoted one unnamed resident of Tehran complaining about the “toy shop tactics” of the Iranian government, saying they are “annoying” when “we have such serious issues to confront.”

What worries me, though, is less the effect of this mockery inside Iran itself, than the message it sends to Iran’s pals about the extent to which it is safe to defy and deride the U.S. The RT story — let’s reprise that link —  “Iran sent pink drone to Obama,” ran on the English-language version of a Russian news site. Especially in any Russian context, toy tools of foreign policy evoke the embarrassing red “reset” button that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented in 2009 to the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov — complete with the mistranslation with which the State Department labeled the toy button with the Russian word for “overcharged,” rather then the intended “reset.” Photos of Clinton and Lavrov show them laughing together over the toy button. But the real laugh has been Russia’s, at U.S. expense, as the U.S. has ceded one important policy position after another, from dropping the promised missile defense for Eastern Europe, to bowing to Russia and China, over Syria, by taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council.

Iran’s regime has specialized from its 1979 inception in mockery of America and America’s allies — from parading American hostages blindfolded before the cameras, to kidnapping British sailors from international waters, holding them hostage and returning them in leisure suits bestowed by Ahmadinejad. And Ahmadinejad, in his yearly visits to the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York (for seven consecutive years now), has taken visible delight in taunting the UN’s host country, abusing diplomatic privilege to bring vast retinues to U.S. shores, and using his time in New York to wine and dine the U.S. media, and recruit support at huge receptions and private meetings (his most recent visit, last September, came during the same stretch in which Iran’s Quds Force was allegedly preparing to bomb the Saudi ambassador in Washington).

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In 2009, the Huffington Post featured a spread of her top fashion looks. A year ago, Vogue profiled her as a “Rose in the Desert,” with her Chanel necklace and Louboutin silk handbag. And just last March, she was patroness and keynote speaker at a Damascus conference of the Harvard Arab Alumni Club.

Then Syria erupted in revolt against the dynastic dictatorship of her husband, Bashar al-Assad, and Syria’s First Lady, Asma al-Assad, pretty much vanished from view. More than 5,000 Syrians have died, as the government has descended to the brute depths of shooting and shelling its own people, in its own cities — this brutality abetted by the Quds Force of Iran. For the past 11 months of mass protest and bloody repression, Asma al-Assad has been an elusive figure, rumored to be in London, then perhaps back in Syria, then reported last month as in Damascus but trying — unsuccessfully — to escape.

Now the Times of London is reporting having received an email from Asma, or at least from an intermediary in her office, saying her husband “is the President of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the First Lady supports him in that role.” The Times is a subscribers-only site, but the Telegraph reports on the Times’s story, quoting the unverified email as saying that Asma’s “very busy agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she has been involved with” as well as “supporting the President as needed,” and “bridging gaps and encouraging dialogue” as she “listens to and comforts the families of the victims of the violence.”

What to believe? Did Asma al-Assad actually author that email? Or authorize it? Did someone in her husband’s office decide it was time to put the First Lady on the record, again — for the first time in quite a while — as supporting the dictator?

It’s tempting to suggest, yet again, that Vogue apply for a follow-up interview, and this time bring us the real picture, along with whatever details they deem necessary about Asma’s shoe collection. But no one’s expecting that to happen. So we’re left trying to peer into the hall of mirrors that dictatorships become. Is Asma al-Assad, in some New Age version of “Let them eat cake,” really gliding around to her favorite Syrian charities, saying “Let them bridge gaps”?

Right now we simply don’t know. But Syria’s regime was built on repression, secret police, dungeons and torture chambers long before the misery flared into the demonstrations and answering government violence of the past 11 months. To live gaily atop that scene required either a lack of conscience or a level of self-delusion that could, perhaps, extend to interpreting months of mass murder in the streets as reflecting merely an absence of “dialogue.” That’s how dictatorships work. That’s how, sometimes, immersed in their own unrealities, they go right over the edge.

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So, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta just told told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that his biggest worry right now is that Israel will attack Iran in the next few months. Panetta then spelled out that the likeliest window for an Israeli attack would be April, May or June, before Iran stores enough enriched uranium deep enough underground so that only the U.S. would have the ability to stop the bomb-making. Perhaps Iran should send him a thank you note for the information?

Let’s hope that Panetta had some brilliant hidden agenda in talking like this to the press; perhaps a secret plan for imminent American air strikes that would render an Israeli attack unnecessary, or cover for an Israeli plan to attack tonight. But more likely Panetta simply meant what he said, and he meant to say it. In other words, while Iran keeps building the bomb, his biggest worry is how to stop Israel from acting in its own defense.

That’s fine if you’re dead certain that within the next few months Iran’s regime is either going to collapse, or throw wide open its nuclear program — a la Qaddafi — and invite the U.S. in to pick up the entire nuclear kit and haul it off to be examined at leisure in Tennessee. Does anyone believe that? The immediate collapse of the Tehran regime is a long shot. The notion of the Tehran regime amiably surrendering its nuclear program is utterly improbable, especially after the NATO-assisted demise of Qaddafi — who, had he held on to his nuclear kit, in the manner of North Korea, might have avoided being killed like a rat near a Libyan drainpipe. (Note: Qaddafi survived for years under sanctions. What persuaded him to give up his nuclear program was fear of suffering the fate of Saddam Hussein. What finally brought him down was use of force.)

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Just 46 more states, two conventions and nine more months till we get to go into the voting booths and mark the hanging chads — or whatever technological wizardry awaits us in this next election. I still remember, with disconcerting fondness, a report many years ago of a voting machine in Chicago that managed to fall out of a window on election day. For that matter, having lived in Chicago for a while in the late 1970s, I occasionally wonder if, with no effort on my part, I have continued voting there ever since.

Anyway, while I have enormous respect for the democratic process, right now this campaign year looks interminable. Take your comfort where you find it.

In that spirit, I’m going to take a break tonight from the debates about the debates, the perfidies of multilateral institutions and the horrors of assorted tyrants who do indeed have designs on our general well-being. This is a note about music. A few months ago, my husband came across the music of Stan Rogers, a Canadian folk singer. Rogers died young, in 1983, in an airplane fire. But during his short span, he  wrote some terrific songs, most of them about the sea-faring life. All by himself, he’s a reason to pay more attention to Canada (which has been looking better and better lately).

Stan Rogers  wrote a song — OK, there’s no getting away from politics — which, if you feel a certain affinity for ideas about individual rights and responsibilities, is immensely cheering. The lyrics include the phrase above, “The government dole will rot your soul,” and the toe-tapping line “I like being free and that makes me an idiot I suppose.” The title is “The Idiot.” It’s a treat — two minutes and 53 seconds well spent.

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To the many mysteries of the United Nations, we may now add the case of the curious cocaine shipment, which arrived recently in the UN mailroom in two sacks emblazoned with pale copies of the blue UN logo. Inside the sacks were 16 kilos of cocaine, hidden inside hollowed-out notebooks. UN security officials spotted the shipment and turned it over to the New York Police Department for investigation.

The first two mysteries are who sent the shipment, and who was meant to receive it. The sacks reportedly arrived via DHL, from Mexico, but UN officials say there was no sender listed, nor were the sacks addressed to anyone. Because the sacks looked like UN diplomatic pouches, DHL delivered them to the UN. But UN officials say “the two suspicious bags were not intended for the United Nations and were not UN diplomatic pouches.”

Rife with drugs though Mexico may be, it’s hard to chalk this up to some Mexican drug dealer simply losing track of his (or her) wares and, in a giddy moment, tossing 16 kilos of coke in two fake UN pouches and dropping them off at DHL with never a care about where they might end up. Depending on which account you go with, the street value was at least $440,000 (according to the LA Times) or maybe $2 million (according to Sky News). So what’s going on?

And then there’s the further mystery, as highlighted by Matthew Russell Lee of Inner-City Press at the UN’s Friday noon briefing: “Why, when the bags were discovered, there was no attempt to wait to see who might try to pick them up?”

The reply this question elicited from the UN spokesperson was the circular argument that since there was no address on the bags with the fake UN logo, they were not intended for the UN, and there was no point in waiting to see if someone would try to pick them up:

“There was no address, either addressee or from whom these bags had come– there was nothing; nothing. So it is rather odd to think, well you need to wait for someone, turn up when the bags were never intended to come here in the first place.”

We don’t yet know what was going on with these wayward sacks of cocaine. But what does seem clear is that UN authorities had strangely little interest in finding out.

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“The tide of war is receding,” or so President Obama keeps saying. He said it on June 22, 2011, talking about Afghanistan. He said it on Sept. 21, 2011, in his address to the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. He said it on Nov. 11, 2011, at Arlington Cemetery. He said it on Jan. 5, 2012, while announcing cuts in the U.S. military.

And on Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, there it was again. Though this time Obama presented it less as an announcement than as the established context for his further remarks: “As the tide of war recedes… .”

If saying could make it so, this would all be a marvelous exercise. But there’s a dangerous muddle here, in which the gutting of U.S. defense and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from overseas theaters are confused with an end to war. If the metaphor here is to be one of ocean tides, then the extension of the metaphor is that we are being invited to spread out our well-padded entitlement programs and picnic on the beach — oblivious to the signs that the water is coming back. North Korea and Iran are still working on nuclear bombs and missiles. Iran, along with its ties to al Qaeda, continues to arm and support terrorist groups such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which in turn have networks well beyond the Middle East, including in Latin America — where Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just completed yet another visit to his pals in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. China is busy with a massive military buildup. Russia is sending arms to Syria. And, with the U.S. nodding along, Egypt is on its way to Islamist rule. These are not developments that herald an imminent era of  peace. Neither is the plot alleged by Obama’s own Justice Department, in which Iran’s Quds Force planned to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant, just last fall — sometime between Obama’s first two iterations about the receding tide of war, and the last three.

There’s something else that’s troubling about this “receding tide” formulation. Like that long and bending “arc of history” which Obama invoked while passively bearing “witness” in 2009 to the slaughter of Iranian protesters, this “tide” business implies that while the little folk might fret about the growing threats, the president walks hand in hand with some grand force of history which, catalyzed by his presence, will somehow sort it all out. It’s of a piece with Obama’s declaration when he became his party’s candidate in 2008 that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” In that same speech, he went on to say, “this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation … .” Whatever the talk of arcs and tides, America has enemies focused on the here and now. Are we really more secure?

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… Check out salaries at the United Nations. According to the U.S. envoy for UN Management and Reform, Joseph Torsella, UN salaries average out to $119,000 per year, and at UN headquarters in New York they are on average 30% higher than U.S. federal salaries in Washington.

The UN hasn’t figured much in the Republican debates, but surely those are numbers that would resonate with average American voters — who pay the biggest share of the bill for these average UN salaries.

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