Bush gives 24-hour ultimatum to UN on Iraq
US President warn world body it must decide on Monday whether to throw its weight behind Washington's hard-line.
By Olivier Knox - LAJES, Azores Islands
US President George W. Bush said Sunday that he will push to revamp the United Nations if its Security Council fails within 24 hours to approve a resolution paving the way for war on Iraq.
The US leader used a joint press conference with prime ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain to warn the world body that it must decide on Monday whether to throw its weight behind Washington's hard-line.
"We hope tomorrow the UN will do its job. If not, all of us need to step back and try to figure out how to make the UN work better, as we head into the 21st century," he said after they held a crisis summit on Iraq here.
The pow-wow came after a week of frenzied telephone diplomacy failed to win clear support from wavering Council nations for a US-British-Spanish resolution widely seen as setting the stage for a US-led invasion to uphold a November 8 disarmament ultimatum, Security Council Resolution 1441.
"It's important for the UN to be able to function well if we're going to keep the peace, and I will work hard to see to it that, at least from our perspective, that the UN is able to be a responsible body, and when it says something, it means it," he said.
"Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," said the US president. "Tomorrow is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work."
Asked whether Monday was the deeply divided Council's final opportunity to vote on the resolution and whether the diplomatic window would close thereafter, Bush confirmed: "That's what I'm saying."
But despite that ultimatum, the resolution's fate is far from clear: France, threatening to use its veto, has led such firm opposition to the measure that the nine votes needed for passage would seem to be beyond Bush's reach.
After initially describing the rift as a principled disagreement between two allies, administration officials now privately rail against France and say that institutions like the Security Council give it power beyond its true means.
Some conservative commentators have mused that Bush could be so angered by a successful French roadblock that he would push to change the very makeup of the council, perhaps by adding to the five veto-wielding permanent members.
Bush has kept mum on such topics, but he has vocally castigated the United Nations for failing to halt the slaughter of ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo or the genocide that choked Rwandan rivers with bodies.
"The UN must mean something. Remember Rwanda or Kosovo. The UN didn't do its job," he said Sunday.
During the 2000 White House race, however, Bush said he would not have intervened to halt the massacres in Rwanda, as did his rival, then-vice president Al Gore. |
