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.”

The minutes include the usual mind-numbing welter of UN buzz words: “sustainable…implementing… institutional framework… integration, implementation and coherence…” etc. George Russell has done us the favor of slogging through this, and sums it up as as an agenda of “bold ambitions that stretch for years beyond the Rio conclave to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions ‘to manage the process of globalization better.’”

Could this really go anywhere? Don’t underestimate it. Thanks in substantial part to U.S. tax dollars that subsidize most of its system, the UN has the ability and resources to stage these mega-conferences, whether the U.S. contributes directly or not. These conferences produce secretariats that become permanent fixtures, and spin off other conferences, commissions, programs — which in turn become frameworks and funders of global lobbying efforts in which an organized few can trample the interests of a disorganized many. At what cost to humanity does this “sustain” and continually expand the UN, and its ever-swelling ambitions?

As it is, we have a huddle of UN officials — none of them chosen by any process that a normal democracy would recognize as elections — bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and protected by UN immunities, meeting in luxurious secrecy on Long Island to plan the reshaping of the world. Not a good sign.

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).

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yet, with tensions high over tougher sanctions on Iran, and Iran’s threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, here come the calls for Groundhog day, again. From Trita Parsi, with his knack for channeling policies that benefit Iran, not the U.S., comes an op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post, “How Obama should talk to Iran.” Parsi’s prescription is that the U.S. administration drop sanctions and shower Iran with (more) offers of respect: “Talk to everyone — and talk a lot.” Implying that Iran’s power structure is similar to that of the U.S. (by way of quoting an unnamed “prominent journalist” close to the foreign minister of Turkey to that effect), Parsi urges a “process” that would have U.S. officials engaging — respectfully, of course — in “sustained” palaver with a panoply of Iranian “power centers,” including “the supreme leader’s office, the parliament,the president’s circle of advisers, the National Security Council and influential clergymen.” Parsi would have the U.S. jabber away for however long it might take to build a “strong rapport” with Iran, in expectation that eventually the happy day would arrive on which Iran’s regime would have talked with so many U.S. officials, for so long, that Tehran would no longer feel the need to pursue nuclear weapons. (Of course, by then Iran’s regime would almost certainly have nuclear weapons — but let’s not be dissuaded by such tedious practical considerations…).

Also writing in the Washington Post, on “Steps to Defuse a Crisis,” David Ignatius more modestly suggests that the U.S. and Iran need a back channel for direct communication. For this purpose, he would like to volunteer CIA director Gen. David Petraeus, and the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Gen. Qassem Suleimani. Ignatius notes that “Some would argue Suleimani is the heart of the problem” — what with some U.S. officials believing he was probably aware of the Quds assassination plot that the Justice Department alleges was meant to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C.  But Ignatius suggests that “precisely because Suleimani heads Iran’s most powerful intelligence network, messages through him would carry special weight.”

Haiti’s president protested. The five peacekeepers, all from Uruguay, were sent home to face prosecution. Uruguay’s ambassador to the UN apologized. But now comes a report from ABC News — “Haiti Outrage: UN Soldiers from Sex Assault Video Freed.” ABC’s Brian Ross reports that the case has apparently stalled. It’s been put on “indefinite hold.” And a UN official has confirmed to ABC that the former peacekeepers have been turned loose. It seems the Uruguayan prosecution could not find the victim, though ABC’s Ross notes that his name and address are well known, “if there is any interest in finding him.”

It gets worse. ABC’s report includes an interview with a UN peacekeeping official, an American, Assistant Secretary-General Anthony Banbury. Asked if there’s any way to ensure that UN peacekeepers accused of sexual exploitation and assault will face justice, he simply admits, “Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t.” In an earlier incident, when more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers in Haiti were expelled for sexually exploiting underage girls, there was no sign they were ever prosecuted. That’s been largely the way of it, as cases of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers have turned up again and again, in places such as the Congo, Bosnia, Cambodia, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Burundi, Haiti, and South Sudan.