So, there was the big Arms Trade Treaty conference at the United Nations, rolling along toward consensus approval of the deal, with some 2,000 attendees gathered in New York for the grand finale. And at the last minute, the whole thing stalled out, because the Trio of Evil — Iran, Syria, and North Korea — said no.

Surely that’s not because Tehran, Damascus, and Pyongyang are worried about infringing on Second Amendment rights.

Something about this is puzzling, and I’ll confess upfront I do not have the answer. Maybe it’s obvious, and I’m missing it. But, setting aside for the moment the question of whether the UN should be ginning up an Arms Trade Treaty in the first place, I’d like to focus on the players. Why these three?

Press accounts are offering various explanations. The New York Times suggests that with all three nay-sayers being under arms embargoes already, they “were concerned that the treaty would add muscle to such blockades.” Reuters offers a similar account, citing the views of anonymous western diplomats. The Iranian ambassador is quoted here and there, lamenting that the treaty has big loopholes that would leave it “hugely susceptible to politicization and discrimination.” Syria’s ambassador objected that it would not stop weapons transfers to those fighting his government. North Korea’s delegate complained that it was “not balanced.”

None of that quite adds up. A prime feature of UN treaties is that in practice they apply most heavily to countries with democratic governments — which, unlike dictatorships, are constrained by domestic debate and rule of law to abide by their agreements. Rogue regimes are less burdened by such niceties. If the U.S. signs onto a UN arms trade treaty, it’s a lot likelier that the result would be to interfere with the Second Amendment than to stop North Korean arms-smuggling to Syria and Iran. These are countries that don’t mind violating every rule in the international book, or cheating on any deal they make. Beyond the arms embargoes that all three have already been violating, Iran, Syria and North Korea all have records of ignoring international treaties in order to pursue nuclear weapons.

In raw economic terms, inveterate illicit arms dealers such as North Korea might actually stand to profit from a international treaty that would constrain those more punctilious about honoring their agreements. Rogue suppliers might get yet more business, commanding higher premiums.

So, what was the real aim of Iran, Syria, and North Korea popping up, arm in arm, in New York, three against 190, to derail a treaty they would be highly unlikely to honor even it if passed and they signed on? I don’t have an answer, but I do have the sense that something is missing from the explanations.

For rogue regimes to threaten America and its allies is nothing new. But I have the distinct sense these days that the threats are both prolific and becoming more boldly specific.

North Korea isn’t just making its usual threats to drown South Korea in a sea of fire. Pyongyang has been cranking out cheesy videos depicting missile attacks on Washington, and  just threatened to attack American military bases in Japan and on Guam. Iran’s rulers are not only expressing their usual generic wish to wipe Israel off the map. Iran’s top boss, a.k.a. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, just celebrated Nowruz with a televised speech threatening in geographically precise terms that if Israel’s authorities “make the slightest mistake the Islamic Republic will annihilate Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.”

For that matter, Hamas, the terrorist overlords of the rogue non-state of Gaza, took it upon themselves last month to threaten President Obama that if he visited the Temple Mount during his trip to Israel, they would take it as a “declaration of war” against the Islamic world.

Is this business as usual, or cause for increasing alarm?

“Stick and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me”…?  Hardly reassuring. In these realms, there are already too many sticks, stones, missiles and explosive devices. All these actors have an extravagant history of mayhem and murder, going back to their various inceptions. And what they appear to be learning from each other is that they can make ever uglier threats with relative impunity. There are, of course, reasoned arguments to be made that such threats are largely for domestic consumption, or that the comfortably ensconced thugs ruling over such places as North Korea, Iran and Gaza, for all their brinksmanship, would prefer not to launch attacks so devastating as to provoke devastation in response. There’s even a case to be made that dire threats are a sign of desperation, or are perhaps just laying the groundwork for a better starting position at the bargaining table. But with North Korea conducting missile and nuclear tests, with Iran’s uranium centrifuges spinning, with Hamas trucking in weapons from Iran, it’s ever more ominous that the threats from this gang keep pushing the envelope. Time to ring the world’s super cop… but who is that these days?

Basketball eccentric Dennis Rodman is reportedly planning an August idyll with North Korea’s young tyrant, Kim Jong Un — a replay of his February excursion to Pyongyang, from which Rodman returned to report that his new best friend, Kim, does not want war. He just wants a phone call from the president of the United States.

Farcical? Yes. Except Rodman’s infatuation with the heir to North Korea’s totalitarian system has wound its way into the debates over what’s really going on in North Korea. This kind of thing fuels the apparently bottomless impulse in some quarters to believe that with a bit of outreach and coddling, the Pyongyang regime might just be persuaded to scrap its weapons programs, water down its personality cult, and behave like the kind of better-mannered dictatorship the U.S. doesn’t mind seeing overthrown. By these lights, the new tyrant of Pyongyang is merely a basketball-loving newlywed, a misunderstood fellow who likes Mickey Mouse and sports, and just needs a helping hand from the leaders of the free world to come in from the cold. If, in the meantime — so this argument tends to run — Kim’s regime is testing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, declaring an end to the 1953 Armistice, threatening nuclear strikes on the U.S. and South Korea, and promising a rain of bullets and sea of fire… well, what else is a lonely, misunderstood young dictator to do?

Were Kim Jong Un just some oddball down the block, lost in some virtual-reality cosmos of apocalyptic digital games, there might be some merit to sending in Dennis Rodman or, if need be, Mickey Mouse, to talk him down. But Kim presides as hereditary cult figure over the seasoned elite of a regime which has sustained itself through monstrous brutality at home, and an astounding set of rackets abroad, including not only state peddling of narcotics and counterfeit U.S. currency, but also the proliferation of missiles (to clients such as Iran, Syria, and Pakistan) and nuclear technology (remember that clandestine copy in Syria of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor?). The totalitarian system is real, the prison camps are real, the weapons are real. Also real is North Korea’s remarkable expertise at nuclear extortion, by which I mean its long record of shaking down the West, repeatedly, through a mix of threats and come-hither nuclear-freeze deals — on which Pyongyang has invariably cheated.

Is there anything left to say about Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea? Maybe.

Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea was clearly a publicity coup for Rodman, for North Korea’s third-generation tyrant Kim Jong Un, and for Vice Media — which cooked up and organized the trip. With Rodman advertising Kim as a his new friend,  ”honest,” “awesome,” and “a great guy,”  it was one more blow for those who believe that what North Korea needs is not more basketball for the Party elite, but the opening of its prison camps, ending of its global crime rackets, scrapping of its missile and nuclear weapons programs and the downfall of the totalitarian Kim regime.

Nor is it wise to simply dismiss Rodman’s comments as obvious idiocy (which they are). Unfortunately, in today’s miasma of celebrity culture, the comments of a Dennis Rodman may reach a lot more people than the testimony of North Korean defectors and the carefully compiled reports of researchers taking great pains to confirm the horrific accounts of North Korea’s gulag, surveillance, political caste system and global rackets.

But could it be worse? Well, yes. It has been.

At least Rodman arrived with none of the gravitas or government backing (real or implied) of the high-level envoys who over the past 19 years have lavished offers, concessions and trust on the North Korean regime. From Jimmy Carter in 1994, to Madeleine Albright in 2000, to the peripatetic diplomacy in 2007-2008 of U.S. nuclear negotiator Chris Hill, North Korea has received a parade of American visitors — and played them for fools. Carter came up with the Agreed Framework nuclear freeze deal, implemented under President Clinton, in which North Korea got free food, fuel and the promise of two nuclear reactors; North Korea took all it could get, before it got caught cheating on the deal. Madeleine Albright, who had a more subdued view than Rodman of basketball as a way to bridge the democratic-totalitarian divide, brought Kim Jong Il a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, hoping the common ground could be expanded to include a North Korean climbdown on missile development; she got nothing for her pains. Chris Hill spent two frenzied years during the second term of the Bush administration avowing that a real nuclear freeze deal was in reach; in that wheeling and dealing North Korea enjoyed the return of allegedly tainted money, got more free food and fuel, got itself removed from the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring states… and cheated and trashed the deal.

Beyond these envoys, North Korea has hosted an additional assortment of visitors more decorous than Dennis Rodman — from the New York Philharmonic in 2008 (shown here performing North Korea’s national anthem, in Pyongyang), to former president Bill Clinton in 2009, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, accompanied to North Korea this past January by Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The result, over and over, has been to dignify the North Korean regime with the respectful attention of American visitors regarded as persons of substance. What’s come of it? About the best one can say is that Clinton retrieved two employees of Al Gore’s Current TV (that was before Gore sold out to Al Jazeera) who had trespassed into North Korea and ended up effectively held hostage. Basically, the scene is one of unrelenting repression, prison camps, global rackets, missile development and three nuclear tests — the latest of those conducted just last month.

Dennis Rodman’s frolic in Pyongyang did no favors to those who favor peace, freedom, and the dignity of 24 million human souls living under the boot of young dictator Kim. But in the matter of playing right into North Korea’s extortion rackets, unless President Obama takes his advice to pick up the phone to call Kim, Rodman probably did less harm than the roster of former presidents, senior administration officials, special envoys and even classical musicians who went before him.

Related: Dennis Rodman Becomes Pro-Nork Bar Loudmouth, Gets Himself Kicked Out

Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan got plenty of attention for his remarks at a UN forum in Vienna last Wednesday, in which he equated Zionism to fascism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism (not that Erdogan seems to object to anti-Semitism; but as Andy McCarthy notes, rational discourse is not Erdogan’s strong suit).

What’s been largely overlooked, however, is Iran’s supporting role in this episode. Turkey and Iran may have their differences right now over such matters as who should reign supreme in Syria. But when it comes to slandering Jews and threatening Israel, Iran and Turkey under Erdogan have become something of a mutual support society. In this instance, the UN event at which Erdogan spoke, to applause, in Vienna — a forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations — had its origins in a 1998 proposal of Iran’s then-president Mohammad Khatami. Khatami pitched the idea that the UN should sponsor a “Dialogue of Civilizations.” Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan embraced the proposal, the General Assembly approved it, and Annan appointed an Italian former UN official with longtime connections in Iran, Giandomenico Picco, to run it. The “Dialogue” went on for a couple of years, filing a report in 2001 that vanished into the archives of the UN library; holding a conference in 2004 in Tehran — basically providing a platform for a lot of travel and palaver under the UN umbrella, to no obvious good result.

Then, in 2005, Annan grandfathered out of the Iranian-proposed Dialogue a similar “initiative” — the current Alliance of Civilizations, co-sponsored by Turkey and Spain. It, too, has an Iranian tang — including the membership on its guiding “high-level” panel of the same former Iranian president, Khatami, who proposed its precursor, the Dialogue of Civilizations. There is no one on this panel from Israel. (More about this Alliance, its Iranian ties, and its exploitation of the UN system, in my article on “The UN’s Anti-Semitic Alliance.”)

The recent meeting in Vienna also served as a vehicle for Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi — amid Iran’s erstwhile “isolation” — to show up in town, get his latest photo-op handshake from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and huddle in closed-door meetings in Vienna. This at a time when officials of the Iranian regime — meeting in Kazakhstan last week with representatives of the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany — have hardly been suffering from a dearth of diplomatic channels.

In sum, the seed planted at the UN by Iran, and nurtured with the help of Iran, has grown into the UN “Alliance of Civilizations” that just provided a pretext for Iran’s foreign minister to tend to his country’s projects and influence in the UN/OPEC hub that is Vienna, plus a glittering stage from which Turkey’s Erdogan, starring as one of the patrons of a UN-blessed event, could deliver his anti-Semitic remarks. Quite the Alliance.

Last year, for month after month, as hundreds of rockets from Gaza hit Israel, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, wrote letter after letter to the UN, asking for urgent, serious action to stop this terrorist bombardment. The UN did pretty much nothing. Finally, on Nov. 14, Israel moved to defend itself by launching Operation Pillar of Defense, targeting terror sites in Gaza. That produced great furor in the “international community,” with urgent calls for Israel to desist, an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, and, within the month, an internationally brokered ceasefire.

Now, Ambassador Prosor has had to take to his keyboard again, writing on Feb. 26 to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to inform him that “After only three months of relative quiet, the citizens of Israel awoke again this morning to discover the horrific reality of terrorism from Gaza.” Writes Prosor: “Earlier today, a rocket was fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon. This is the first rocket that has been launched from Gaza since the conclusion of Operation Pillar of Defense last November…. This attack is an unacceptable breach of the ceasefire that ended our campaign against Hamas last year.”

Prosor asked,  as he asked again and again last year, that the Security Council “condemn this violation of the ceasefire, before the situation escalates.”

What has the UN done? Well, there was a briefing to the Security Council, at which UN officials “voiced their concern.” UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, a former U.S. diplomat (you may remember him from the photo last August, in which he accompanied Ban to pay court in Tehran to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei), stressed the “troubling” nature of the rocket attack, but, in a classic UN formulation, immediately yoked that statement to the notion that the Israelis are to blame for being attacked: “”We know that there are negative forces on both sides… .”

Bottom line: It looks likely that apart from voicing concern, UN officials won’t bestir themselves in the cause of stopping more terrorist rockets from Gaza. Israel’s Ambassador Prosor will be left to write more letters, until Israel’s next attempt to defend itself gets the UN’s full attention.

Meawhile, the UN is busy with other projects.  As Geneva-based UN Watch reports, the UN has just re-elected to a senior post on its decolonization committee a representative of the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.  (UN Watch is on a roll with UN news right now, including this report on a UN researcher for UNESCO and UNIFEM, who wrote for Al Jazeera about a UN meeting on Israel, that apparently never happened.)

On other UN fronts, Fox News reports that the UN (which says its sanctions lists are “updated regularly”) has just removed Osama bin Laden from its Al Qaeda sanctions list… almost two years after he was killed. Let no one say the UN can’t get something done when it really wants to.

More: 

Gaza Militants Celebrate Hagel Confirmation

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, appeared this past Wednesday evening, Feb. 20, onstage at the Asia Society in New York, in a “conversation” with a former U.S. ambassador and under secretary of State, Thomas Pickering. The event, moderated by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, and titled “The U.S. and Iran: Road to War or Path to Peace,” is being described by the Asia Society as “Unprecedented” — yielding “Proposals for US-Iran Negotiations.”

That might sound pretty intriguing, in the run up to next week’s gathering in Kazakhstan of representatives of Iran and the P-5 plus 1 (which, in case you lost track of talks with Iran somewhere back in the days of the EU3, refers to the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council — Russia, China, France, the UK and the U.S., plus Germany).

Actually, the Asia Society missed the boat. Khazaee’s appearance was unprecedented in the sense that he has not appeared previously onstage at the Asia Society. But Khazaee is the mouthpiece for the same Iranian regime that has brought New York its annual visits since 2005 by Iran’s loquacious president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever the differences of style or insinuation, they both track back to the same terror-based uranium-enriching domain of the modestly titled Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. And Khazaee has been rubbing elbows in Manhattan since he arrived in 2007 as Iran’s envoy to the UN — some details of that in my column, “Meet Iran’s Ambassador to the UN.” Last year, he gave an interview to PBS TV’s Charlie Rose. At the UN he pops up interminably, speaking these days for the Iran-chaired 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, praising Iran’s human rights record, deploring Israel, writing letters demanding that the U.S. issue visas pronto to the scores of Iranian officials who like to attend major UN events, etc.

As for Khazaee’s “proposals” — well, it boils down to the same ol’ same ol’. You can watch them unfold in the video of the discussion, which went on for an hour and 40 minutes (in the time-buying game, chalk that up as another hour and 40 minutes for the progress of Iran’s nuclear program). Or I can summarize it for you in one sentence: If the U.S. will just agree in advance to whatever Iran’s regime wants, then Iran’s regime is quite willing to negotiate. Amid the thanks and praise rendered unto him onstage for his willingness to say anything at all, Khazaee pretty much repeated variations on this theme for the entire discussion.

There’s plenty we still don’t know about the underground explosion — presumed to have been a nuclear test — that shook North Korea on Tuesday, February 12. We don’t know if it was a plutonium-based nuclear test (like North Korea’s previous two tests in 2006 and 2009) or a uranium-based test (the apparent bomb fuel of choice for North Korea’s partner in proliferation, Iran, as well as a dual bomb track for North Korea).

Sticklers for certainty can even cavil over whether it was a nuclear test, since there have been no reports yet of any nuclear signature — though it was certainly a large explosion.

But here are some things we do know. We know that North Korea felt free to telegraph last month to the entire world that it was planning another nuclear test, and to issue an in-your-face notification to China and the U.S. when it was imminent. We know that immediately after the explosion, North Korea rushed to advertise it as a nuclear test, and held a televised rally to celebrate (though festive does not quite describe the tenor of the occasion). North Korea also felt free to to threaten that if there is any hostile response from the U.S.:

We will be forced to take stronger, second and third responses in consecutive steps.

How shall we count the dangers of this event?

North Korea is a totalitarian state, in which the regime, to ensure its own survival, not only clung to its brutal ways while an estimated one million or more people died of famine in the 1990s, but orchestrated the distribution of food to starve those deemed least politically loyal. This is a regime that does not hesitate to condemn its own people to be beaten, frozen, and worked to death in its Stalinist slave labor gulag. That’s the character of the Pyongyang government — and when North Korean officials arrive at negotiating tables to seek aid and concessions from the U.S. and its allies, as they periodically do, that is the basis of the power with which they presume to speak for their country.

North Korea has been a vendor of weapons for decades, especially to the Middle East (among the clients: Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan, Qaddafi’s Libya. Some details of this appear in my article on “North Korea’s Middle East Webs and Nuclear Wares“.) Nor does Pyongyang draw the line at nuclear proliferation. North Korea blew past that one years ago, signing up not only as a dealer within Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, but also collaborating with Syria’s Assad regime on the construction of an entire clandestine nuclear reactor — apparently built to serve as a plutonium factory — on the Euphrates (destroyed in 2007 by the Israelis, who deserve the world’s thanks for that).

North Korea’s closest partnership in proliferation is with Iran, one of their most avid longtime missile customers. Iran has sent officials to North Korea’s previous two nuclear tests. There are serious questions about whether this latest test was chiefly for the benefit of North Korea, or Iran — whether a proxy test for Tehran, or a display of North Korea’s newest generation of nuclear wares.

What has the world done about all this? There has been a great effusion of words.

Quick quiz. An inquiry set up by the UN Human Rights Council has just released a draft report condemning:

A) Iran

B) China

C) Sri Lanka

D) Israel

The answer, of course, is D — Israel. This is yet another UN document that deserves to be filed in the same dustbin as the ugly and discredited Goldstone report. Never mind Iran, China, Sri Lanka et al. As the Geneva-based monitoring group, UN Watch, points out, since the UN set up its “reformed” Human Rights Council in 2006, “there have been seven one-sided inquiry missions on Israel, and only five on the rest of the world combined. Mass atrocities committed by Iran, China, or Sri Lanka, for example, have never been subjected to a single HRC inquiry.”

This latest report, due to be formally presented to the Council in March, is captioned “Advanced Unedited Version.” I assume they meant to say  ”Advance,” since there is nothing advanced about this product. It’s the latest in a long series of exhibits that attest not to the realities of the Middle East, but to the unrelenting bigotry of what is supposed to be the UN’s leading human rights body. The full title – brace yourself, this is one of those UN doozies — is: “Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people, throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

The three “high-level experts” appointed by the president of the Human Rights Council to produce this document arrogate to themselves, in its introduction, a description of their work as “Guided by the principles of ‘do no harm,’ independence, impartiality, objectivity, transparency, confidentiality, integrity and professionalism…” Yes, and pigs can fly.

UN Watch gives an incisive summary of the contents of this report, and makes the vital point that while the UN is supposed to foster peace, this kind of inquiry has the very opposite effect: “It has the perverse outcome of pushing the parties further apart, while also inappropriately pre-judging final status issues that can only be resolved through direct negotiations.” I’d add that in obsessively savaging Israel, while ignoring most of the genuine perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the UN Human Rights Council — and the UN generally — waste the considerable resources they are given, dishonor their charter mandate, and do a horrendous disservice to the truly downtrodden.

As UN Watch notes in two additional items currently high on its web site, the UN recently voted the Hugo Chavez regime of Venezuela a seat on the Human Rights Council, and the UN has just elected Sudan as one of four vice-presidents to its powerful Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). These are just two of the latest data points in the UN’s chronic practice of seating thug governments, from Iran to Cuba, on its governing bodies and councils. If the UN is actually capable of  launching a genuinely independent inquiry (it’s not clear that it is), then it’s high time it launched one into its own devolution into a machine for exalting the likes of the Caracas and Khartoum regimes, and under their guidance, cranking out propaganda and endorsing bigotry.

Ship-tracking services show that somewhere off Cyprus right now is a crude oil tanker called the Tour 2, signaling as flagged to Togo. All of which sounds pretty innocuous.

Or is it? Over the past year the Tour 2 has had two different names, sailed under at least four different flags — Malta, Bolivia, Sierra Leone and Togo — and according to the Equasis shipping database, it is now flagged to Iran. In recent weeks, before it began lingering off Cyprus, it sailed from Iran to the Syrian port of Tartous — . And though the ship itself is not on the U.S. sanctions list, some of its previous owners are. Actually, this ship was specifically identified in a report last June by the United Nations Panel of Experts on Iran sanctions, so UN member states would be aware of its connection to a UN-sanctioned shipping company. More on this scene in my article, “A Tale of Iran, Syria and a Busy Oil Tanker.”  

So, are any of those UN member states going to do anything about this?