Saudi Arabian authorities have charged 67 men detained at a party for reportedly wearing women’s clothing.

Most of the men were Filipino and were arrested while standing outside a private party held in a villa near the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on the occasion of Philippine Independence Day.

According to the Saudi daily Al Riyadh, the police questioned the men after spotting "suspicious behavior" and then proceeded to raid the party. More women's clothing, cosmetics, and alcohol were reportedly found in further investigations.

The vice president's visit coincides with a spike in violence, with several bloody bombings in Baghdad and a car bomb in Kirkuk. Tuesday, more than 30 people were killed by a powerful car bomb in Kirkuk.

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June was the bloodiest month in the last eight in terms of Iraqi civilian casualties, according to Iraqi government figures, and both northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul remain powderkegs.

In a series of interrogations before his execution, Saddam Hussein told an F.B.I. agent that on the eve of the 2003 American invasion, Iraq was trapped between United Nations orders to demonstrate that it had disarmed and a fear that appearing too weak would invite attack from its powerful neighbor and foe, Iran.

The ousted Iraqi dictator "was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors back into Iraq," according to a summary of questioning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The inspectors, he feared, "would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq," he told the F.B.I.

Mr. Hussein told the F.B.I. that if United Nations sanctions against his country had been lifted, Iraq would have sought a security agreement with the United States to protect it from Iran.

A few days before the vote, as Moussavi's "Green Wave" began to crest, there were already signs that things might get ugly. On June 9 a widely reported leak from the Interior Ministry said that Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi had issued a fatwa permitting vote counters to manipulate the results in favor of the candidate who is truly a devotee of Islam. "To you, as administrators of the election, everything is permitted to this end," Mesbah Yazdi wrote. The ayatollah, who is Ahmadinejad's chief sponsor among the clerical elite in Qom, Iran's religious capital, is also godfather to a network of scholars and activists from the ideologically rigid Haqqani School, which he established. For that network--which includes many of Ahmadinejad's IRGC allies--the word of Mesbah Yazdi is law. The following day, June 10, Yadollah Javani, ideological czar of the IRGC, issued a warning that the regime was prepared to take strong action against the Green Wave movement, which had burst onto the scene to back Moussavi. "There are many indications that some extremist [i.e., reformist] groups have designed a 'color' revolution," said Javani. "Any attempt at a velvet revolution will be nipped in the bud." It was a chilling reminder of who had the guns.

Why would the Obama administration oppose using sanctions as a diplomatic and economic device to put pressure on the Iranian mullahs to reform? They are telling other G-8 diplomats that they feel the sanctions will “backfire”, driving Iran away from the negotiating table, where Obama thinks we can talk Iran out of their nuclear weapons.

In other words, the fantasy continues. While the rest of the world wants to get tough on Iran, creating more internal pressure on the mullahs by increasing their isolation, Obama wants to allow them to suffer no consequences at all for their oppression and to strip the opposition of a legitimate issue — that the mullahs have made Iran a pariah nation.