AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now! “Who Are They?” by Jim Page. This is Resistance Radio.

President Bush is set to address the United Nations General Assembly today. Administration officials say the speech will challenge the U.N. to enforce resolutions requiring Iraq to accept the destruction of its chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. says it is seeking a single, toughly worded Security Council resolution that would authorize military action if Iraq refuses comprehensive inspections. Bush will tell the U.N. that its authority will be wrecked, unless it forces Iraq to comply with previous resolutions.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will speak before Bush and will argue that the U.S. must not take action without a Security Council mandate. His office took the unusual step of releasing his remarks last night.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced it is preparing to send hundreds of military staff from the U.S. Central Command to Qatar in November. Pentagon officials say the staff will probably form the core battle planning staff for an attack on Iraq. Bush’s speech to the United Nations comes on the heels of a speech he gave last night on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on Ellis Island.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The attack on our nation was also attack on the ideals that make us a nation. Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious, because every life is the gift of a creator who intended us to live in liberty and equality. More than anything else, this separates us from the enemy we fight. We value every life. Our enemies value none, not even the innocent, not even their own. And we seek the freedom and opportunity that give meaning and value to life.

There is a line in our time, and in every time, between those who believe that all men are created equal and those who believe that some men and women and children are expendable in the pursuit of power. There is a line in our time, and in every time, between the defenders of human liberty and those who seek to master the minds and souls of others.

Our generation has now heard history’s call, and we will answer it. America has entered a great struggle that tests our strength and, even more, our resolve. Our nation is patient and steadfast. We continue to pursue the terrorists in cities, in camps, in caves across the Earth. We are joined by a great coalition of nations to rid the world of terror, and we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder. Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power. This nation has defeated tyrants and liberated death camps, raised this lamp of liberty to every captive land. We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history’s latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power. They are discovering, as others before them, the resolve of a great country and a great democracy.

In the ruins of two towers under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, we have made a sacred promise to ourselves and to the world: We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, speaking last night at Ellis Island on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

We’re joined on the telephone right now by Phyllis Bennis. Phyllis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., a journalist who specializes in the Middle East and the United Nations, and is author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN.

The banner headlines, Phyllis, today, The New York Times, straight across the top, “Bush to Warn U.N.: Act on Iraq, or U.S. Will.” He leads nation in mourning at terror sites. Your response to what seems to be exactly what Andrew Card said it would be, the Bush chief of staff, former auto industry lobbyist? When asked why it’s now that the president is amping up the PR campaign to bomb Iraq, Andrew Card responded, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t launch a new product in August.” Phyllis Bennis?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: I think that we’re seeing, on the one hand, an absolute ramping up, as you say, of the propaganda to justify a unilateral war, and, in just the last several days, a shift in the tactics of that propaganda campaign to take into account the United Nations, not by consulting and drawing multilateral conclusions and using the U.N. as a forum for serious debate within the international community, but doing very much what President Bush’s father, Bush senior, did 12 years ago. He went to the United Nations to use it as an instrument, an instrument of justification of a unilateral war, to be justified in the name of a multilateral institution. We’re seeing exactly the same thing being played out now.

The words of President Bush are thoroughly undermining the role and the centrality of the United Nations in global affairs by saying that we want the U.N. to endorse what I want it to endorse, not we want the U.N. to make a decision. We want a U.N. endorsement of what we have already planned to do. It’s very much in keeping, Amy, I think, with the line that has come to characterize Bush’s approach to this entire crisis since 9/11 of last year, in saying you’re either with us or with the terrorists. He is now in the process of treating the United Nations as if it, too, were, in his view, representative of terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet he’s going to the United Nations.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: He is. And that reflects, I think, a recognition in the Bush administration that the international isolation posed simply too overwhelming a problem on the propaganda front, if they didn’t do something to mitigate it, both at the governmental level, where governments around the world were so far — and I am skeptical how long this would last — but so far are remaining adamant in refusing to jump on board this Bush-led train towards war in Iraq.

And similarly, in the United States, the split within elite opinion, the split within the Republican Party, within the Congress, within the administration, even within the military, within the corporate media — the split in all of those arenas has put in place a set of fairly discrete examples of why the Bush position is not acceptable to those elite opponents. And one of the main ones has emerged as there has not been U.N. approval.

Now, I don’t think that most of those elite critics in the United States necessarily believe that the United Nations is, in fact, the repository of international legitimacy and, in fact, needs to be the central actor in dealing with international crises, which is, I think, what international law, in fact, requires. But there is a sense that there should be some kind of an imprimatur by the United Nations before the U.S. moves.

And many people, I think, believe that the Security Council will not be prepared to actually endorse a military strike on Iraq, a U.S. military strike. I think that the Bush administration jumped on, for example, the words, day before yesterday, of French President Jacques Chirac, who posed the possibility of a two-part resolution to be passed in the in the Security Council, the first which would call for the entry of inspectors back into Iraq within three weeks, and if there were to be any violation by Iraq, if they refused or if the inspectors were not allowed to complete their work as the U.N. required, that the council would then meet again to determine the outcome. The Bush administration response to that was to say, “Well, that’s an interesting possibility, because, then, of course, the outcome would be authorization of a military strike.” In fact, I think that the intention of the French president and others who have endorsed, at least tentatively, his proposal is precisely the opposite, that there should be a unified call on Iraq to accept the inspectors, and if there were a future problem, it would come back to the council for more debate, not that it would be an automatic granting of legitimacy to a U.S. or other kind of military strike.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of Kofi Annan’s role right now in giving this speech, which really, in a way, underscores President Bush’s right after?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Well, it’s a very interesting question. Amy. I think that Kofi Annan’s speech made very clear that this is a moment when the United Nations has to be protected from efforts by the United States to undermine it. The idea that the secretary-general would distribute his speech ahead of time is unprecedented at the U.N. It’s not usual. It’s not the usual practice. And in the speech, he was quite explicit in directing his remarks to the United States, to the Bush administration, in saying that we in the United Nations understand our role within the Security Council, that that’s the only place for legitimacy. In his words, “There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.”

And he spoke about how — in the words of the Charter, he said that any state, if attacked, retains the inherent right of self-defense under Article 51. But beyond that — and he went on to say that the only other way that a state can use force is when it is authorized by the Security Council. I think this was an effort to fairly directly undermine the Bush administration’s effort to use Article 51, which is the one place where self-defense is authorized in the U.N. Charter, as the basis of an attack on Iraq, as they did in Afghanistan. And, of course, the problem with that analysis is that Article 51 is very explicit in saying that self-defense is a right that accrues only if a country has been attacked. It doesn’t happen ahead of time. So this notion of preemptive strikes does not fall within the U.N. Charter. It stands as a violation.

Now, traditionally, and Kofi Annan’s speech of this morning, which he’s about to give in, I think, about 20 minutes, is not an exception to this. The secretary-general does not harshly condemn even the most egregious threats, in this case, by the United States to undermine the United Nations. It’s a very moderate and very diplomatic approach. But the words are quite unmistakable, Amy, I think, when — in the discussion of multilateralism, it’s a very direct rebuke to the clear unilateralism that has come to characterize the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Nelson Mandela condemning the United States as a threat to world peace, saying, “If you look at those matters, you’ll come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace,” saying, “The U.S. backing the coup by the shah of Iran in '53 led to Iran's Islamic Revolution,” saying, “Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior advisers of Bush are dinosaurs,” and that “U.S. support for Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and its refusal to work with the U.N. after the Soviet withdrawal, led to the Taliban taking power.”

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Mandela’s speech, Amy, was an extraordinary, an extraordinary statement. It was a very explicit condemnation of the U.S. for acting — although he didn’t use this word, but really what he said was that the U.S. is acting as a rogue state and represents, itself, a threat to the peace and security of the world, as it claims to be acting against those it determines to be a threat to its own version of stability around the globe. And given the extraordinary moral credibility of the South African leader, who has been quite reticent in the years since he turned over the presidency after the election of Thabo Mbeki, Mandela has been quite careful in choosing his forum and choosing the topic for his public presentations. He’s been very cautious. So, for him to emerge with a very harsh condemnation of these U.N. threats — sorry, of these U.N. — sorry, U.S. efforts to undermine the U.N., and its threats to the peace and security on a worldwide basis, represented a very serious challenge, I think, that the Bush administration will be very hard pressed to meet when Bush gives his speech an hour from now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks, Phyllis. You’re listening to Democracy Now! We’ll be back In a minute.