UNITED NATIONS – President Bush on Tuesday urged nations around the world to help Iraq become a democracy and predicted that “freedom will find a way” to flourish.

Standing before the 191-member United Nations, Bush acknowledged the difficulties of Iraq’s chaotic transition from dictatorship to representative government. He said U.N. members “must respond” to pleas for help from Iraq’s interim leaders.

Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was among nearly 100 world leaders who listened to Bush’s speech in the cavernous U.N. chamber. Delegates to the 59th annual U.N. General Assembly responded to Bush’s 24-minute speech with polite but unenthusiastic applause.

Bush ignored past differences over the Iraq war and repeatedly linked Iraq to the more popular U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. He described both countries as “the world’s newest democracies” and predicted more terrorist attacks as they near national elections.

Afghanistan is scheduled to elect a new president next month; Iraq plans national elections in January.

“The work is demanding. But these difficulties will not shake our conviction that the future of Afghanistan and Iraq is a future of liberty,” Bush said. “The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail.”

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Bush missed an opportunity to win international support at the United Nations by failing to fully acknowledge the problems in Iraq.

“Iraq is in crisis, and the president needs to live in the world of reality, not in a world of fantasy spin,” he said in Jacksonville, Fla., in his first news conference since Aug. 9. “The president failed to level with the world’s leaders” whom he was “lecturing instead of leading.”

“The president really has no credibility at this point,” Kerry said. “He has no credibility with foreign leaders who hear him come before them and talk as if everything is going well, and they see that we can’t even protect the people on the ground.”

Kerry said Bush should convince world leaders that “we are all together with a stake in Iraq” and convene a summit to bring international support for training Iraqi security forces and rebuilding the country.

Bush’s latest U.N. visit came two years after he challenged the international organization to support his march to war and a year after he assured U.N. diplomats that victorious U.S. troops would “reveal the full extent” of Iraq’s pre-war weapons programs.

Since then, Bush has had to acknowledge that U.S. intelligence agencies overstated the threat from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And the heady optimism that followed the swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by the grim reality of a reconstruction effort beset by attacks and a U.S. death toll now over 1,000.

Bush didn’t mention weapons of mass destruction in Tuesday’s speech. Instead, he cast Iraq as a pivotal battleground in the war on terror and a test case for democracy in the Middle East.

“Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom,” he said. “Instead of harboring terrorists, they’re fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all.”

At the United Nations, the deep split over the U.S.-led invasion continues to shape opinions over the rebuilding effort. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who told a British reporter last week that the Iraq war violated international law, delivered a thinly veiled rebuke to Bush in his opening remarks to the General Assembly.

“No one is above the law,” Annan said. He condemned the attacks in Iraq but also expressed dismay that captive Iraqis were “disgracefully abused” by U.S. troops.

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Although the United Nations never specifically authorized the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq, Bush said he was authorized to act by a U.N. resolution that promised “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to disarm and cooperate with international weapons inspectors.

Other leaders took issue with Bush’s description of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a historic global march to democracy.

While there is “very strong solidarity” over the need to fight terrorism, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero said, “there are differing views when you talk about such a conflict as Iraq.”

Zapatero, who withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq after he won election in March, expressed doubt that Iraq would be ready for national elections in January. Annan has indicated that he may oppose a U.N. role in overseeing the vote unless security improves.

Allawi, who met with Bush at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel after the president’s speech, accused reporters of exaggerating the problems in Iraq. The Iraqi leader will join Bush in Washington on Thursday for a joint news conference.

“It’s very important for the people of the world really to know that we are winning, we are making progress in Iraq,” Allawi said. “Unfortunately, the media have not been covering these significant gains.”

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Minutes after Bush’s meeting with Allawi, Islamic militants in Iraq claimed they had executed a second American hostage in as many days. The earlier beheading of hostage Eugene Armstrong, an engineer, was shown on the Internet.

Armstrong, 52, was abducted in Baghdad last week along with fellow American Jack Hensley, 48, and Briton Kenneth Bigley. Tawhid and Jihad, the group that took responsibility for Armstrong’s beheading, announced it had killed a second American hostage without mentioning Hensley by name.

“These killers want to shake our will,” Bush told Allawi. “We will not allow these thugs and terrorists to decide your fate and to decide our fate.”

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(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Thomas Fitzgerald contributed to this report from Jacksonville, Fla.)

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): BUSH-UN





AP-NY-09-21-04 2017EDT