UNITED NATIONS, Nov 7: US billionaire Ted Turner said Thursday he hoped the world would learn from the errors of the Iraq war and that the United Nations would be strengthened by it.

“The unilateralism and our action on that war hasn’t been that successful for the United States, and Britain,” he told reporters.

“It’s easy to start a war, it’s very hard to end it.”

Turner spoke at UN headquarters where he went to report on the United Nations Foundation, which he founded with one billion dollars in 1997.

“There were no weapons of mass destruction, the security is very poor there,” he said.

“And we are in a mess. And out of that we might learn a lesson and give this preemptive war and unilateralism another thought.”

He called the Iraq war “a very divisive action, but this has happened to the UN before.

“It happened numerous times during the Cold War and the UN survived that,” he said.

“It’s very possible that the UN will come out of it much stronger than it was before.”

Turner also lauded the foundation’s inclusion of the sixth woman on the 11-member board of directors, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former director of the World Health Organization.

“Men should be barred from public office for 100 years,” he said. “We would have a much better world.”

Since its founding six years ago, Turner’s group has donated 689 million dollars for children’s medicine and to fight AIDS.

Turner founded CNN, but in 2003 lost his post as vice president of AOL Time Warner, which had purchased CNN. He remains the largest single shareholder.

He said of the Iraq war, “People are paying a price now, not only a price in gigantic amount of money, the United States spent billions of dollars bombing and damaging Iraq, now we have to spend 87 billion to fix it back up again.—AFP