George Bush today used his final speech to the UN before stepping down as the US president to defend the "war on terror" and urge other countries to support it.
Bush said terrorism was the biggest challenge faced by the UN since its charter was drawn up in 1945.
The US president - who ultimately ignored the UN in pressing ahead with the 2003 invasion of Iraq - said the scale of the threat illustrated that the UN and other multilateral organisations "are needed more urgently than ever".
In a rebuff to those arguing that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had acted as a recruiting tool for extremists, Bush said: "Bringing the terrorists to justice doesn't create terrorism - it's the best way to protect our people."
He described the theory that not all countries wanted democracy as "self-serving condescension".
"Whatever disagreements we nations have had in Iraq, we should all welcome this progress [over the past 20 months] towards democracy and peace," he said.
As the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, looked on prior to his own address later today, Bush identified Iran and Syria as countries that "continue to support terror" and said they were becoming more isolated from the world.
He praised Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for tackling terrorism but, in insisting that terrorists must be pursued everywhere in the world, including "ungoverned spaces", appeared to deliver a coded warning to Pakistan about its lawless north-west frontier.
The US says Taliban and al-Qaida extremists are using the region as a base to launch attacks on US-led forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Bush said that rather than issuing resolutions condemning terrorist atrocities after the fact, UN members should take an "unequivocal moral stance against terrorism" and work closely to prevent attacks from happening.
He did not solely focus on military means of confronting terrorism, also identifying taking people out of poverty, giving better health provision and "the elimination of trade barriers" as ways of preventing people from being sucked into extremist ideologies.
He reiterated his hope for a "free and peaceful" independent state for Palestinians and his recent criticism of Russian military aggression against Georgia.
The US president accused Moscow of a "violation of the words of the UN charter".
