U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to New York to discuss the crisis in Lebanon with United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the European Union's foreign policy chief, the State Department announced yesterday. Rice is likely to make a trip to the Middle East this weekend, after talking with Annan and the EU's Javier Solana, but State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said she had not yet fixed a date. “She wants to time it so that it is useful and helpful in getting a cease-fire that is lasting and brings a durable cessation to violence,” he said. Annan, Rice and Solana will have a private dinner Thursday evening after Annan briefs the full U.N. Security Council on Lebanon, said U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown. Malloch Brown said Rice's trip is meant to “get everybody on the same page about the facts of what's happening in this very confusing situation.” He said there would be a larger meeting with senior U.N. and U.S. officials, members of a U.N. mission that had been in region, and others, on Friday. The three-member U.N. team returns from the region today. It remains unclear whether the mission, led by Annan's political adviser Vijay Nambiar, will report to the full Security Council. “There is no doubt that the ability of the international community to influence these extremely dangerous events in the region will be enormously helped if everybody is as close to each other as possible in terms of the messages they're delivering to the leaders of the region,” Malloch Brown said. Rice is still scheduled to travel to Asia next week for a regional tour, including her first visit to Vietnam. That visit is unlikely to be cancelled as it is set to include her first appearance at the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting. Rice was perceived to have slighted members of the organization by sending her deputy Robert Zoellick to the meeting last year, instead of attending personally.
