This Year, Bush Takes a Different Tone With the U.N.

By Glenn Kessler

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 15, 2005; Page A08

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 14 -- Three years ago, making the case for confronting Iraq, President Bush said the United Nations would sink into irrelevancy if it failed to act at a "difficult and defining moment." But, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, the president struck a strikingly different tone, praising the "vital work and great ideals of this institution" and its efforts to take the "first steps" toward managerial and structural reforms.

A year ago, in the same venue, Bush denounced terrorists as people who believed "the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights and every charter of liberty ever written are lies, to be burned and destroyed and forgotten." Bush condemned terrorism in this year's speech as well, but with a twist -- he explicitly linked defeating terrorism to changing "the conditions that allow terrorists to flourish."