Bush to suggest how UN can be improved

US President George Bush will suggest ways in which the United Nations could be improved in his final speech to the world body today.

Global leaders are in New York for the UN General Assembly’s annual meeting and Mr Bush will make his last appearance before the UN as president of the United States.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose nuclear programme will be discussed on the sidelines of the session, is also expected to speak later today after increasing tensions between his country and the US at the weekend.

US National Security advisor Stephen Hadley said Mr Bush’s speech “will highlight the current challenges facing multilateral organisations like the United Nations and how to improve the ability of these organisations to meet these challenges”.

“He’ll talk about the need to focus on results,” Mr Hadley said. “You’ve heard him say he’s kind of an outcomes guy, not a process guy, and sometimes we spend too much time on the process and not enough time on the outcomes.”

Mr Bush’s speech comes at a time when many of the collective diplomatic ventures he has championed face problems:

- The West is trying to restrain an increasingly aggressive Russia that drew condemnation for its recent invasion of US-backed Georgia;

- A prickly North Korea is backing away from pledges to abandon nuclear weapons;

- A Palestinian-Israeli peace pact before Mr Bush leaves office is highly unlikely;

- Violence is flaring in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- Iran is pursuing its nuclear work in defiance of US and international demands.

Iran's president Mr Ahmadinejad stepped up his own anti-US rhetoric on Sunday, saying that his nation’s military would “break the hand” of any aggressor that targets his country’s nuclear facilities.

The financial crisis on Wall Street, just a few miles from the UN headquarters in Manhattan, is also likely to come up as more than 100 world leaders gather in New York.

Mr Bush will also use the meeting to try to shed the caricature of a go-it-alone cowboy in a bid to show the world that the US is a team player - despite its invasion of Iraq in March 2003, without the UN’s blessing.

Brett Schaefer, an expert on international organisations at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, said: “I think it’s an image that remains in the minds of a lot of people. But if it ever was true, it certainly isn’t true today.”