09/16/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10133

BUSH CHALLENGES U-N ON IRAQ

President George W. Bush has called on the rest of the world to join the United States in combating a serious threat to international security and the authority of the United Nations. That threat, he told the U-N General Assembly, is posed by Saddam Hussein’s aggressive regime in Iraq.

As President Bush said, the U-N was born in the hope that survived the Second World War -- "the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear. . . . After generations of deceitful dictators and broken treaties and squandered lives, we dedicated ourselves to standards of human dignity. . .and to a system of security defended by all."

But today, said Mr. Bush, these standards and this security are challenged "by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit on their violent ambitions. . . . In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale."

In the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, said President Bush, "we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront."

Saddam Hussein has defied international law and, for more than a decade, numerous U-N Security Council resolutions. He has invaded two countries, Iran and Kuwait. He has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens, many with poison gas. In addition to chemical weapons, he has developed even deadlier biological weapons and sought to develop nuclear weapons. And he has harbored and supported some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists."

The conduct of the Saddam Hussein regime, said Mr. Bush, "is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U-N demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?"

As President Bush said, "the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. [The U.S.] will work with the U-N Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the U.S. should not be doubted. . . . [T]he just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power."