Kofi's fixer

The United Nations was repeatedly told that its $US56 billion ($A74 billion) oil-for-food program was being mismanaged but was "unwilling or unable" to fix the problem, according to a preliminary report released yesterday.

It seems as if this guy might be the man of the moment, then. Here is what he tells Randeep Ramesh:

[Mark] Malloch Brown [Kofi Annan's new 'chief of staff'] appears to agree with the widely held view from inside the Beltway that the UN has become unmanageable because it has been left unmanaged for so long. "The UN is not a place with a management culture. There's not a quality of accountability, transparency and openness in the way it's run."

The result, he says, is that bureaucrats in the UN have become preoccupied with the "process" rather than "results". "The first thing we need to have is senior management accountability."

Here are some other things Malloch Brown thinks:

"It is fair to say that if you look historically at the past 60 years of the United Nations, things rarely go well when there are strains in the relationship with the US," he says. "Just look at this polarisation over Iraq. We must learn to trust the US without being seen as a poodle of America. It is a tough line to walk and Iraq has exposed it."
.....
It is clear that Malloch Brown wants to lower the profile of the Iraq debacle, which has suffered an indecent amount of exposure under his predecessor's stewardship. Too much has been made of differences between Washington and other nations, he says soothingly. Spats, he reasons, are part of the way the world works and the best way of dealing with them is to let them happen. "The measure of a good relationship is not to agree on everything but to disagree without the UN getting dragged off the end of the pier in the East River in concrete boots."

Oh, and he thinks that 'Paul is a great guy'. Who's Paul? Find out in the Guardian - to many of whose readers this will not endear him.