Seems Kofi got the message after all. Courtesy Outside the Beltway, this item in the FT:
The United Nations is looking for a well-connected Washington figure to head its information office there, as part of a wide-ranging image makeover to improve relations with Congress.
The move, revealed to the Financial Times on Thursday, is touted as part of a public information revolution within the UN, which began with the recent appointment of Mark Malloch Brown, a former strategic communications professional, as chief of staff to Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general. According to one UN insider, the idea is to appoint an influential advocate with Capitol Hill experience who “understands how Washington works, can make calls, and get those calls answered”.
As
It's astonishing that a global institution wouldn't have such a lobbyist in the first place. Isn't the US the most powerful country? Isn't it, at the most basic level, a permanent member of the security council? Why wouldn't you have a full-fledged operation whose sole purpose is to monitor beltway politics, especially since one major party tends to take a skeptical view of your very existence?
Can't imagine who "revealed" it to that London rag the FT. Mightn't it be some Brit who's moving into the office next to Kofi's?
In any event, this UN move shouldn't come as any surprise to readers of chez Nadezhda, huh? See comment thread below the fold.
[Further UPDATE} For those without FT access, here's a good profile in Guardian Online of Mark Malloch Brown, via Normblog. You don't imagine somebody's got a image-remake campaign started with the press, now do you? And BTW, MMB is old friends with PW and EJ. But then it's a small, small world.
Originally posted 1-3-05 by praktike
Now somebody decided to leak the fact that a super-secret intervention meeting with the embattled Kofi Annan took place recently at Richard Holbrooke's pad:
The crisis meeting of veteran foreign policy experts in a Manhattan apartment one recent Sunday was held in agreed-upon secrecy.
The high profile guest of honor came unaccompanied by his usual retinue of aides and without the knowledge of most of his closest advisers. The mission, in the words of one participant, was clear - "to save Kofi and rescue the UN."
At the gathering, Secretary General Kofi Annan listened quietly to three and a half hours of bluntly worded counsel from a group united in their personal regard for him and support for the United Nations, but deeply concerned that lapses in his leadership over the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first term and were jeopardizing chances of making the remaining two years of his term meaningful.
Emphasis mine. So why the leak?
I'm by no means schooled in the dark arts of forensic leakology, but my guess is that either one of the people at the meeting does not actually want Kofi Annan to stay, or perhaps his response was deemed unsatisfactory ("He sat in silence and made no effort to defend himself") and the group is trying to put pressure on him to act, mainly be shaking up his staff. Holbrooke is quoted on the record in the piece, and I assume him to be the leader of this group, so I imagine this is all part of the show. Even so, the word seems to be that the Bush administration is expecting the Volcker report to deliver the coup de grace. This article was Kofi's wakeup call.
(A note: there are several different versions of the article floating around cyberspace now. As of this writing, the Times version was slightly different than the IHT version. I first read the Times version last night, and at that time it didn't have a few of the on-the record quotes that it does now.)
UPDATE: Steve Clemons drops some serious "connects," and suggests that it would have been smart to include some Republicans in the intervention. He suggests someone connected to Hagel or Scowcroft. That probably would have been a good idea.
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