by Patrick J. Buchanan – September 18, 2002

Whatever one may think of the wisdom of invading Iraq and opening a third front in the war on terror, President Bush’s address to the United Nations was a tour de force.

The president gave it to the Tower of Babel with the bark on, as “Cactus Jack” Garner used to say. With Kofi Annan seated behind him, Bush bluntly told the U.N. what it already knew: A decade of its commands had been treated by Saddam Hussein with utter contempt. Either the U.N. acts now to enforce its resolutions, or the U.N. becomes as irrelevant as the League of Nations in the 1930s when it failed to sanction Mussolini for his invasion of Ethiopia.