Global Policy Forum

By David Stout

President Bush defended his decision to wage war against Iraq, telling the United Nations today that the country will be a beacon of freedom in the Middle East and that liberty-loving nations should not falter in the face of terrorism. "The advance of freedom always carries a cost," Mr. Bush told the United Nations General Assembly in New York City after acknowledging that more terrorist incidents are a virtual certainty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 25-minute address, the president did not allude to his own sometimes fractious relationship with the international organization, especially his decision to invade Iraq and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein without the backing of the United Nations Security Council.

But Mr. Bush said that the demise of the old Baghdad dictatorship had released the people of Iraq from years of cruelty and oppression, and that not just Iraqis but people throughout the Middle East would benefit. He said, too, that Mr. Hussein's flouting of the United Nations after the first Persian Gulf war had invited retaliation. "The dictator agreed in 1991, as a condition of a cease-fire, to fully comply with all Security Council resolutions, then ignored more than a decade of those resolutions," Mr. Bush said. The president, who earlier in his administration challenged the United Nations to be more muscular or resign itself to being little more than an international debating society, was more soft-spoken today. "The Security Council promised serious consequences for his defiance," Mr. Bush said, referring to Mr. Hussein. "And the commitments we make must have meaning. When we say `serious consequences,' for the sake of peace there must be serious consequences."

But Mr. Bush did not take a lecturing tone today. "The American people respect the idealism that gave life to this organization," he said. "And we respect the men and women of the U.N., who stand for peace and human rights in every part of the world." Declaring that "we all have a stake in the success of the world's newest democracies," Mr. Bush urged the United Nations to do more to help build an Iraq that is "secure, democratic, federal and free."

In response to critics who have said that the United States adopted a reckless, go-it-alone approach, the president said: "We're determined to destroy terror networks wherever they operate, and the United States is grateful to every nation that is helping to seize terrorist assets, track down their operatives and disrupt their plans." He expressed gratitude for the help of other countries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush, whose address was answered by respectful applause, broke no startling new ground. But his speech was widely viewed as important because of its timing. Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, will address the United States Congress on Wednesday, and some members have voiced grave doubts about the course and the cost of the peace-keeping campaign in his country.

And Mr. Bush spoke a day after his Democratic challenger for the presidency, Senator John Kerry, accused him of deception and incompetence in his approach to Iraq. The president's speech coincided with the latest atrocity in Iraq, the beheading of an American hostage, the second such incident announced this week. Mr. Kerry, campaigning in Florida today, said the American undertaking in Iraq was not part and parcel of a war on terrorism, as Mr. Bush contends, but rather an "enormous diversion" from it. The real war on terrorism, Mr. Kerry said, is against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and is being waged in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Iraq is "more and more of a mess every single day," Mr. Kerry said at a news conference in Jacksonville. Success is essential and depends in part on much more help from other countries, the senator said. Even as Mr. Bush was speaking, the Kerry campaign's national security adviser, Rand Beers, issued a scathing denunciation. "Faced with the dire consequences of his wrong choices in Iraq, George W. Bush continues to mislead the American people and pose false choices rather than face the reality of his failed policies," Mr. Beers said.

The United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, criticized the United States in advance of Mr. Bush's address, both implicitly and explicitly. "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it," Mr. Annan said, in what seemed to be an allusion to Mr. Bush's decision to invade Iraq without full United Nations backing.

There was no doubt about Mr. Annan's meaning when he said "we have seen Iraqi prisoners disgracefully abused." He was referring to instances of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Bush said, as he has frequently, that he believes in "the transforming power of freedom," and he acknowledged that cold political calculation has sometimes stymied that transformation. "For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability," he said. "Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom and strive to build a community of peaceful democratic nations."

The depth of disagreement over the United States' campaign in Iraq was illustrated this morning, when Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the United Nations ambassador under President Bill Clinton, were interviewed minutes apart on the NBC News program "Today." Despite the bloodshed, Ms. Rice said, "there's a political process under way in Iraq that has already brought into power a very good government of Prime Minister Allawi." Elections will take place as scheduled in January, and be viewed as legitimate by the Iraqi people, she predicted.

Mr. Holbrooke, now an adviser to the Kerry campaign, saw things differently. "The fact is that the situation is extremely serious," he said. "It's unraveling." A moment later, he said, "Unless we turn the ship around in Iraq, we're facing a strategic disaster of tremendous consequences."