Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen.  I always think listening to an introduction like that is a bit like a preview of one's obituary, isn't it?  It reminds me of a gentlemen from Los Angeles who comes to Britain intent on looking at our cathedrals. He got to St. Paul's and went round the back and saw a telephone on the wall, a particularly conspicuous telephone because it was gold.  So he asked the Canon of the cathedral, "What is that phone?"  The Canon said, "Well, that's a special phone.  You pick that up and you get straight through to God."  He said, "Well, what does it cost?"  "It's $2,000 a minute."  Anyway, he went and had the same experience in Durham, in Edinburgh and then finally came to that most magic of cathedrals -- St. David's in Wales.  Found the same telephone and said to the Canon of St. David's, "Is that the phone you get through to God?"  "Yes."  "What's it cost here?"  He said, "It's a dollar an hour."  "That's astonishing.  Why is it so cheap?"  "Well, you see, in Wales it's a local call."  I was promised you'd have a sense of humor so I thought I would throw that in.

I made a mistake, of course: I left briefly and you cribbed my speech.  So you've said half the things I was going to say, but I hope I don't replicate too much of the introduction.  What I want to do is give you some idea of the breadth of the work of the United Nations, the practical things that it does, and try to explain from my view why I believe we need a United Nations, why we need to make it work as best we can and it's not just because I've been there for six months and now I'm defending the organization I happen to be posted to.  It actually comes as a matter of conviction.

Today out there in the outer world more than one billion people live on less than one dollar a day.  More than ten million people are living as refugees, forced from their countries by conflict, persecution or natural disaster.  It is estimated that a further 20-25 million are internally displaced—refugees from their homes but still within their own country.  Floods affect an average of 140 million people every year – the severity of annual flooding set against shortages of water and conflict which arises from that shortage in areas like the Middle East and Central Asia. 

In 2002 there were new landmine casualties in 65 countries; the majority of those countries were at peace.  The illicit trade in light weapons is worth, we think, $1 billion a year, we think.  Most of the buyers are in war-torn countries.  Afghanistan is home to around ten million light weapons.  I could go on and list the countries of Africa.  Forty million people live with HIV/AIDS today.  In Kenya, AIDS deaths are equivalent per day to two full 747 jets crashing.  Life expectancy in one country—and this one really shocked me—in 1990 the average life expectancy was 67.  At the moment it's 47 and in 2010 it will come down to 27.  That's a mark of the progress in that particular country.

Yes, many of those problems affect mostly developing countries, but none of the problems remain neatly within national borders.  None can be tackled solely by national means, and today we face a range of global problems that require and demand global action.

And the fact is that today's political structure is not shaped for a globalized world.  Political decision-making normally rests with national governments.  National borders, quite naturally, continue to define the extent of governments' nominal responsibilities.  But to meet those responsibilities in today's world means reaching beyond borders.  Bilateral action between states just isn't enough, and many of the major challenges need a comprehensive approach if they're going to be addressed at all.

Terrorism is a classic case.  Combating and defeating terrorism requires a concerted and wide-ranging effort by all countries if this scourge is to be defeated.  Military action is necessary, better intelligence is required, defensive systems need to be improved, some organizations need to be proscribed, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction must be ended, financial flows to terrorists must be cut off and we must do better at tackling some of the resentments that encourage terrorism.  Does anyone think we can tackle any of those subjects alone, that we can insulate ourselves alone from these threats?  Let's just take financial flows.  If half the world cuts flows to terrorists then they'll just go through the other half.  They'll find the weakest link always.  So, there has to be a link that affects all.

Does anyone think that strengthened security measures alone can deal with these threats?  I think the answer is clearly no.  The hard clarity of Cold War threats may be gone but it is increasingly obvious the divide between the so-called "hard threats"—war and terrorism—and on the other hand the "soft threats"—poverty, disease, human rights abuse—is a false distinction.  If you're sitting in the Kalahari Desert you may not be terribly worried about terrorism, but you're surely very concerned about where your water is coming from or where you get your food.  Conflict destroys economies.  It affects us all in that way.  Failed states are breeding grounds for terror and extremism.

Four years ago Afghanistan was just a distant quarrel.  We sympathized, but we felt our national interests weren't sufficiently engaged to do very much about it.  That's the truth of it.  I know that in London we took the decision that British interests were not really engaged, so, “tough”, but there are lots of other things we need to concentrate on.  The problem was that most of us took the same position.  Afghanistan wasn't a major concern.  The results?  2001 with a vengeance.  We cannot any longer afford the luxury of saying, "that country out there doesn't matter.  It's not an interest."  The English poet, John Donne, called it hundreds of years ago when he said, "No man is an island."  Well, that is evidently true today. 

I think today we are at least more conscious of the gaps in the system and the extent of the challenges we face.  Now, there have been some real efforts to try to address them.  For example, through the work of the United Nation's Counter-Terrorism Committee which Jeremy Greenstock, who was here not so long ago [at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council] actually chaired when that committee was set up, and the current efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to what we call non-state actors, i.e., the terrorists.  I think we're also seeing more focus on prevention of conflict and of the recurrence of conflict.  It's a sad fact that 60 percent of the countries in conflict were previously also in conflict and we failed to build the peace.

The question of intervention remains controversial, but I do think there's a growing realization that we have to address internal sources of instability, to recognize the instability in one country can too easily spill into another and that the broad approach of bridging the traditional U.N. split between the economic, the social and the security side we need to try to tackle that.  The best example I can give you is Liberia.  Again, we said, "Well, President Taylor is in office and there's not much we can do about it."  So, meanwhile, Sierra Leone got contaminated, now Cote d'Ivoire is contaminated, and Liberia itself became a total basket case.  Those are the consequences of inactivity and inaction by the national community.

We turn to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which I remember as a kid in school in1960 was the first real peace-keeping operation I ever came across, but with independence came the trauma of this beset country.  Conflict in the Congo, quite properly, is being called Africa's First World War.  At one point, seven national armies and numerous armed groups were involved.  That fighting has left 3.5 million people dead, most of them civilians, and some 4 million, at least, forced to leave their homes.  Seventeen million people in the DRC today are classified by the United Nations as "food insecure" – that means that they don't know where their next meal is coming from.  One in five children dies before the age of 5.  The DRC is perhaps a classic example both of what the United Nations system can do and what it cannot do.  For the first three years of its existence, the United Nations' peace-keeping operation in the Congo was able to do very little.  A peace agreement had been signed in 1999 but without any real commitment to the warring parties.  The U.N. was able to do little more than effectively document violations, to inspect what had happened.  I should make it clear that the figures I'm talking about are the last six years of the Congo -- the totality of the deaths since 1960.  I don't know the figure, but it must be at least double figures of millions.

Now, what then could the U.N. do?  Could we have enforced the peace that the majority of ordinary Congolese and their neighbors so clearly wanted?  In Sierra Leone in 2000, when the rebels turned on the government, U.N. peacekeepers and the civilian population alike became the targets.  The United Kingdom actually sent a force.  I remember the decision very clearly, in London on a Friday night, the Minister said, "We'll deploy on Monday lunchtime," and they were on the ground in Freetown. I have to tell you they bound heads together very robustly, but the net result of that was it saved U.N. peace-keeping in Sierra Leone because then others were able to come in when the situation had stabilized because of what our troops had done. 

But it's not so easy in the DRC.  The size of the country, the scale of the fighting, is immense.  If you stretch the DRC out – have one end in London - the other end of the country would be in Moscow.  That’s the scale of what we're trying to cope with.  But the clear moral case is there, but one needs help to tackle it.  The fact that with Sierra Leone one country, in that case the United Kingdom, was prepared to take the lead and risk its troops meant actually that we were able to tackle it.  But the problem for the international community is, how often are people prepared to do it?  Secondly, if prepared, do they have the troops and the capacity to deliver them as quickly as they're needed to the source of conflict?  The fact is that very few countries are able to do that.  Of the total forces available through 19 NATO nations eight percent are deployable within a reasonable period of time, and for reasonable read three months.  If you can deploy eight percent, that means that to actually do an operation you can only take one-third of them, which means something in the order of two and one half percent are deployable for operations. The reason for one-third is the simple truth that if you have X troops in a country taking Iraq today, you need another X ready to go into Iraq to relieve those there and you’ve got X who just came out of Iraq who need, quite naturally, to be retrained and have some rest as a result of what they've just done.  So, there's always a 3 to 1 gearing for such an operation.

At the center of the United Nations Operation in the Congo is a peacekeeping operation.  Its many tasks include working to disarm and repatriate all foreign fighters—over 6,000 estimated at the moment—and to disarm an estimated 125,000 surplus Congolese soldiers.  But disarming is only a start because the problem is what do you then do with them?  Where do they find some money to survive?  Can soldiers go back into their communities?  This is a shocking statistic, there are 17-year old colonels—and the systematic brutality which those child soldiers have been required to apply to their own communities is part of the whole system of locking them in.  They have nowhere to go, because their own families, their own communities have long since rejected them.  So what do you do with those people?  It's a huge problem.

How do you help a new government to build a nation, to form a unified national army and a police force—because you need somebody to deliver indigenous security—to bring the rule of law, the respect of human rights to all parts of that country, to prepare for elections, to start to rebuild an economy, to give hope to ordinary people and an alternative to those who have spent the last five years living by the gun?  That’s the challenge, and the question is does the international community want to do it?  Do we have a moral obligation?  Do we have a security interest in actually doing it?  The answer I think, to all questions is self-evident.  But it's also a question of developing relations between the DRC and its neighbors so that whole – I suppose one quarter Africa-is no longer a zone of total instability but can actually have some chance of prospering and tackling the problems it actually faces.  The UN has a program of projects to help bring an immediate "peace dividend" to the ordinary Congolese: seeds and tools to allow villagers in newly-stable areas to start feeding themselves; restoration of roads and bridges to open up communities isolated by years of war, the restoration of schools, hospitals, water supplies, and so on. 

Now, if that strikes some sort of echo it should bring to mind what's happening in Iraq today, what's happening in Afghanistan, what's been done in the Balkans for these last ten years to try to restore communities, order and develop democracies.  Those things don't just suddenly happen.  They take enormous effort.  At the center of that is the United Nations, the international community network, UNICEF—I was delighted to hear that here in Los Angeles in the last week you raised 1.5 million dollars for UNICEF— the UNHCR, the World Food Program – all those are involved, helping the donor countries, among them the nongovernmental organizations, to coordinate the effort that's needed today in the Congo and needed in all sorts of places.

I digress now to tell you that as I left the Security Council last night I met the United Nations genie who pops up occasionally and the genie offered me one wish.  So, being statesman-like I said, "I'd like to make a major contribution to peace in the Middle East, please."  So, the genie said, "Do you have the road map?"  So, I produced it and after a long considered look the genie said, "I'm sorry.  I can't do that."  I said, "Well, in that case can you give me a second wish?"  He said, "Yes."  So I said, "Look, I have to give a speech tomorrow to a very influential, intellectually demanding audience in Los Angeles.  Could you help me with the text?"  So the genie paused and then said, "Could I have another look at those maps, please?" 

Now, to take a more familiar reference, I refer to Afghanistan.  I went with the Security Council to Afghanistan in November.  A country ravaged by 13 years of conflict and inattention.  Even now much of the land is under the control of warlords who are more interested in their own power, which is maintained by drug trafficking and violence, with little interest paid to the needs of the people.  Let me tell you the good side of Afghanistan.  The United Nations has brokered a deal with the Afghan factions for the peaceful transition to democratic government.  The United Nations is supporting the Afghan Human Rights Commission, including ,crucially, the rights of women.  Again, this was something that was such an apparent abuse and which we tolerated and did nothing about it United Nations and international donors are helping to rebuild the country and more than $4.5 billion has been pledged.  UNICEF has got 4.2 million children back to school, 37 percent of whom are girls.  "Why not 51 percent?" I asked one of the local governors.  And he said, "Well, that's because from where we started, 37 percent is remarkable."  It is, but they have a long way to go.  The World Health Organization has given 16 million vaccinations against measles.  I hadn't realized exactly how many deaths are caused each year by measles.  I knew measles was something we had as kids that we caught and we scratched and in a couple of weeks we were ok.  I hadn't realized that half a million children a year die of measles.  Two and one half million refugees have been returned to Afghanistan and some 750,000 are still internally displaced. Something in the order of 300,000 anti-personnel and 1,800 anti-tank mines have been destroyed.  A constitution has been agreed in the last month and they're headed for elections.  There are huge challenges but they have prospects and they have them because of the intervention of the international community and the willingness of some nations to stand up and actually take on the challenges. 

I could repeat that description across a range of countries.  Today, there are 15 United Nations peace-keeping operations in different parts of the world that range from Cyprus to the Congo, from Lebanon to Liberia, and so on.  They involve more than 40,000 personnel working for peace.  The UN agencies are often understated and they don't get enough, in my view, praise for what they do, but they are coping with refugees, they're delivering aid, humanitarian assistance, longer term economic development.  All these things are being done today.

Put simply, I think the facts on the ground are convincing.  But the fact is also that the U.N. is invariably criticized, largely because expectations of it are unrealistically high.  It's not a world government, it's more of a parliament, a forum, I have 190 fellow Permanent Representatives, that's the extent of the countries represented but the assets and the responsibilities the U.N. has are those given to it by the member nations.  While it is the Security Council which decides whether to send peacekeeping operations it has distinct limitations because it can approve the operation, but nations have to volunteer the troops to send.  The United Nations cannot itself create agreement, let alone enforce it, where there is none.  What it does do is provide an opportunity and a venue for efforts to try to reach agreement.

I have focused today on some of the worst situations around the world. I haven't touched on much of the work that the U.N. does – less dramatic, but which affects us all: protecting the environment, agreeing on ground rules for trade and the benefits of the WTO should be obvious to all of us.  Secondly, setting the agenda for cooperation on international development, the millennium goals, the obligations we've taken on, building the framework of international law and standards, leading international efforts to tackle health crises, be it HIV/AIDS, SARS and so on.

The range of problems confronting the international community is actually vast, but the key factor in tackling these issues is the will of individual nations to stand up and make the system work.  There is a framework to find solutions at the political level and to help take forward practical action on the ground and that is the United Nations, but it depends on others to enforce it.

It's normally at this stage that I notice that people are starting to leave to go off to other engagements.  Quite recently I noticed that people were drifting off very quickly and by the end there was one solitary gentleman left and I carried on to the end and I went up to him and said, "thank you very much for staying with me," and he said, "That's all right.  I'm the caretaker.  I have to clean up after you."  But I am coming to the end so there's hope.  But beware: all my colleagues who say "I'm going to be very brief", that is the biggest lie in the United Nations, because they're never brief. 

Why do we need actually a framework of international law?  Something we take for granted, perhaps less so in the United States because the United States has a simpler maxim which is, "if it's true in the United States Law it must be true in international law," and the rest of us don't work on quite that basis.  But why do we need it?  We need it to regulate international society.  We need to establish stable relations for doing all those things that we do internationally, all the benefits we take for granted – travel, trade, immigration rules, all those things are set down and they help us.  They also set out a system of values which, for the most part, bind our nations together, to consolidate democracy and the rule of law and they do so on an international basis.  If you turn the clock back 250 years and think how lawless was much of the United States and then you wondered why you had a system of law, you'd conclude probably that anarchy wasn't a good thing and it was better to be regulated by a system that everybody subscribed to and was actually enforced.  The principle applies exactly the same for international law and it is what ought to influence nations as to how they behave and is what we expect nations to actually sign up to and implement.

Now, that was at the heart of some of our difficulties last year and the United Nations has, I think, seldom had as much attention as it did in the first half of 2003.  The Security Council failed to agree on military action in Iraq.  The fact is that we all agreed at the time on one goal—full Iraqi disarmament in compliance with the Security Council's numerous resolutions.  What we failed to agree on was how to achieve that.  And for some that heated public debate was as much about the United States' power in the world as it was about Iraq.  But since last summer I'm pleased to say that politics have eased considerably, the focus has returned to what is best for the Iraqi people, and we have been able in the Council unanimously to agree on a way forward.  The multinational force in Iraq has a Security Council mandate and a U.N. political team has just come back from a very important mission to Iraq to help identify how the Iraqis best now want to proceed in their quest of setting up democratic institutions, how can it put in place the transitional government by the June 30 deadline and do that in a way that it will carry most of the Iraqis, and preferably all the Iraqis, with us.  That's the challenge, but it is quite significant that the United Nations has come back into play at this stage not, in the view of the British, because it’s a last resort, but because it gives to the whole endeavor a degree of international legitimacy which we always wanted. 

The Secretary-General, the very esteemed statesman like figure that he is, recently launched a high level panel to look at the way the United Nations handles the threats to peace and security.  This comes against the background not only of the disagreement over Iraq, but also the wider question of how to respond to new and increased challenges such as international terrorism, proliferation of WMD, and so on.  The challenge now is to ensure that we have the means and the political will to tackle the collective threats that we face.  As Kofi Annan said at the opening of the General Assembly in September, "It's not enough to denounce unilateralism, unless we face up squarely to the concerns that makes some states feel vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action.  We must show that those concerns can, and will, be addressed effectively through collective action."  That's the challenge to the international community and to the United Nations today.

It's not surprising that the United Nations with 191 members has difficulty in responding adequately.  In my previous jobs I found that at 15 it was difficult, at 19 slightly more difficult and at 191 you might say it's impossible.  The miracle is that it isn't impossible and more and more the response can make a real difference.  The U.N. is imperfect – no one could possibly dispute that, but remember this, it wasn't designed to take the world to heaven.  It was conceived out of the ashes of war to save us from another hell.  That's how it came about and that's what it's trying to do.

Ultimately, it's a ship sailing in stormy waters.  It's unfair to blame the vessel for the squalls that beset it or indeed the squabbles among the crew.  The U.N is trying to cope with the world's problems, and in the last resort, it is the political will of member states that will determine our success in overcoming problems of facing up to the real situations out there—the Afghanistans of tomorrow.  The United Nations provides the opportunity to find solutions, but it's up to the nations to will the means for us all to succeed.

Thank you very much.