Ad Melkert's own credibility and ethics issues at UNDP

While we are on the subject of Ad Melkert, formerly head of the World Bank's ethics committee and now one of Wolfowitz's chief accusers while at the United Nations Development Program, it bears noting that he has ethics issues of his own at UNDP. Since some part of the questionable accusations against Wolfowitz depend on Melkert's credibility, it is worth bearing in mind that over at UNDP, he has proceeded to hire, outside the competitive hiring process, a politician from his own Dutch Labor Party. See the Inner City Press stories, here and here (these folks, by the way, do genuine investigative, shoe leather reporting and spare no one - well, enough said by way of comparisons ...). As the Inner City Press story said:

"UNDP's hiring of Eelco Keij of the Dutch Labor Party is another example of Melkert "making the best" of the UNDP rules -- that is, bending or breaking them, as is alleged of Wolfowitz at the World Bank."

Also, according to Inner City Press, it might well be that this whole fabricated coup against Wolfowitz is under the direction of Mark Malloch Brown in pursuit of the goal of becoming Wolfowitz's non-American replacement. See the same stories, above.

One additional point. I have never met Paul Wolfowitz. I'm not raising these questions because I have any relationship whatsoever with him or anyone around him; I hold no political positions or anything else - I'm just a very ordinary professor in DC. I am astonished and appalled that powerful people - in the administration and out - who were responsible for putting him at the Bank have not come to his aid - he appears to have no friends in DC, so far as I can tell, besides Christopher Hitchens. I generally agree with Wolfowitz's policies for the Bank and for development, particularly African development. He was naive about the Iraq war; I've written my general views of neoconservatism and Wolfowitz's naive version of neoconservatism, here and here. But I think the ethics charges amount to nothing and are merely the means for a disgruntled staff and its European allies to stage a coup because they hate him and the Bush administration for the Iraq war, among other reasons, and because they don't really have all that much against corruption as such, either in the Bank or among its clients. That's what it comes down to - venal means in pursuit of a political coup.