Iran tells the truth...

Not about its nuclear program.


But rather about the UN.

You can read this pretty much anywhere: this is an average take, a report from the AP.

Ahmadinejad puts it bluntly:

"The [UN] resolution was delivered dead. Ten more similar resolutions will not affect our economy and our policy," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast live on state-run television as he delivered a budget for the new year.

"Falsely, they want to imply that we have had costs in this regard," the president said — an apparent reference to recent news stories in the West that prices of food and other basics have risen in Iran since the UN sanctions were imposed in late December.

Now, what does this tell us?

First of all, it tells us that the UN, as it exists and as it works, means nothing to Iran's current government, and that they feel free to ignore the UN in its entirety.

What does this mean? That we can expect Iran to lie to the UN, to prevaricate, to deliberately mislead the UN - and perhaps more importantly, public opinion - in regard to anything that Iran does.

This means nothing less than that any official representation by Iran to the UN can be viewed as meaningless.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the UN is off the hook: this, for instance, is only slightly less than absurd:

On the nuclear issue, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said it has found no evidence that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, but it has criticized the country for concealing certain nuclear activities and failing to answer questions about the program.

This sort of stuff makes it hard to take the UN seriously at times. But then again, I'm not a country.