NEW YORK: Although there was a sigh of relief that he was not announcing a new crusade against Iraq the way he did from the same podium last year, George W. Bush’s speech to the UN General Assembly Tuesday was as wooden as we have come to expect, leading to unkind thoughts. (Wouldn’t it be fun if the TelePrompTer froze!)

Of course, no one was expecting him to apologize for getting it wrong. But you would never guess from his speech that the weapons inspectors he sent to scour Iraq have not found a single working weapon of mass destruction, nor that the Iraqi scientists they have interviewed concur that the weapons were actually destroyed when Saddam Hussein said they were.

The president did not mention that the war he fought “for the credibility of the United Nations” was opposed by the overwhelming majority of UN members, nor that he has since refused to let the UN’s own weapons inspectors return to Iraq even though the whole campaign against Iraq a year ago was based on Saddam’s refusal to let them in.

Instead, the president declared, “The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction.” This is, as Winston Churchill said when parliamentary etiquette forbade him to say that a colleague had lied, “a terminological inexactitude.” There is no doubt that Saddam used terror against his own people on a huge scale — at times with the support of President Bush’s father. There is no evidence whatsoever, as Bush himself admitted a week ago, that Saddam was behind Sept 11, even if the administration has somehow persuaded a large majority of the American public that he was. It took the US destruction of the tightly controlled Iraqi police state to make the country a haven for the world’s terrorists.

While invoking “terrorists” in his speech, the president introduced a new threat to the world: “proliferators.” Although this is less worrying than explicitly naming Cuba, Syria, Iran and the other countries that have appeared on the administration’s hit list, it appears as yet another open-ended threat to justify military action against anyone Bush and his advisors get upset with.

It’s too bad that he ignored Kofi Annan’s earlier speech, which definitively lay down the international law on invasions. Before Bush spoke, the Secretary General had politely but firmly attacked the administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive and unilateral challenges under which “states are not obliged to wait until there is agreement in the Security Council. Instead, they reserve the right to act unilaterally, or in ad-hoc coalitions.” Annan declared that if this doctrine “were to be adopted, it could set precedents that resulted in a proliferation of unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification.”

In contrast, President Bush was muted about his own stalled attempt to get a UN resolution calling for countries to send troops to join a multilateral force in Iraq. He certainly made no concessions to those who think the UN should indeed have a more vital role there than simply persuading the Indians, Turks and South Koreans to send their troops to join the occupation. Indeed, he dismissively relegated the UN N. to assisting in “developing a constitution, in training civil servants and conducting elections.”

He pointed proudly to representatives of the Iraqi Governing Council sitting in the Iraqi seats in the General Assembly, but forgot to mention that they have been calling for a rapid handover of power to themselves. But then his own administration has been disparaging the council as unfit to rule without Paul Bremer’s supervision. Bremer should know. He picked them.

In the face of such significant omissions, it is not surprising that the world’s leaders sitting in session were a little underwhelmed when the president tried to project compassionate conservatism on a global scale with his call for action against sex-trafficking. Was this addressed to the Soccer Moms or the Bible Belters, and if so, do they listen to UN speeches? Certainly, on the evidence of the president’s own speech, he does not listen much to others’. The sound of silence is often deafening when statesmen speak, but in the case of George W. Bush it is the deafness that is almost as stunning. He neither hears nor mentions disagreement.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service