Late last year, Claudia Rosett wrote an article detailing the way Iran has come to occupy key positions of power and influence within various agencies of the United Nations. She follows up with an update: Iran will chair the UN’s “flagship” agency: The United Nations Development Program, a position which will afford it greater influence within the lesser-developed world. Still worse, the UNDP is not just any old U.N. agency. It is the U.N.'s lead development agency, the chief coordinator in the field of almost all the others, loaded with money, dispensing high-level advice along with more than $9 billion per year around the globe--some $5 billion of that from its own budget and another $4 billion or so on behalf of other U.N. operations. Headquartered in New York, across the street from the U.N. Secretariat's landmark domino building, the UNDP is a vast bureaucracy, blanketed in diplomatic immunity, bankrolled both by U.N. member-state contributions and hundreds of...(Read Full Post)