Bush Right to Stick Up for Iraqi Policy Before U.N., Journalist Say
by Chad Groening and Jody Brown
September 22, 2004
(AgapePress) - A best-selling author and national defense expert is commending President Bush for making no apologies about his Iraq policy during an address on Tuesday before the United Nations. The journalist believes the U.N. failed in its efforts to protect the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein.Speaking before the United Nations yesterday, President Bush took on critics who have blasted America's efforts to bring freedom to the people of Iraq -- and to forcefully confront terrorists. "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," the president stated.
"We're determined to end the state sponsorship of terror ... to prevent proliferation, and to enforce the demands of the world -- and my nation is grateful to the soldiers of many nations who have helped to deliver the Iraqi people from an outlaw dictator."
Bill Gertz, the national defense correspondent for The Washington Times, says George W. Bush was right in defending his decision to topple Saddam because the United Nations failed to deal with the now-deposed dictator.
"The U.N. really was a failure in dealing with Iraq," Gertz says. "The foreign minister [of Iraq] said 'you failed us, you failed the Iraqi people' by supporting this ruthless dictatorship headed by Saddam Hussein."
In his speech, President Bush alluded to Saddam's refusal to abide by directives issued from the international body.
"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," Bush said. "Finally, the Security Council promised serious consequences for his defiance. And the commitments we make must have meaning. When we say 'serious consequences,' for the sake of peace, there must be serious consequences. And so a coalition of nations enforced the just demands of the world."
Because the U.N. itself tried -- and failed, in Gertz's opinion -- to bring Saddam under control, the Times correspondent says he cannot understand why U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recently stated that the U.S.-led war was "illegal."
"I think that that was a bit over the top," Gertz says of Annan's comment. "When you think about [how] the U.N. has gone through so many different resolutions demanding that Saddam Hussein act in a normal fashion toward his own people and disarm his weapons programs -- which he ignored and continued to ignore -- I thought 'How could he come out and say that?'"
Gertz says he has documented how the U.N. failed the people of Iraq in his new book Treachery: How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies.
