Though yesterday's remarkable speech to the UN General Assembly was framed as an indictment of Iraq, it was as much an indictment of the UN. It was not only Iraq to whom Mr. Bush was giving one last chance. It was the UN.

Indeed, as Mr. Bush quoted from the long list of Security Council resolutions Iraq has ignored with impunity over the "decade of defiance" since the Gulf War, it grew clear that it was not only Iraq who was in violation of these resolutions: so was the UN.

Over the years, as resolution followed resolution, without compliance and without consequence, Saddam Hussein came to view these resolutions much as a UN delegate views a parking ticket: more as a nuisance than an obligation.

Resolutions? Better to call them irresolutions. Resolution 688, demanding that Iraq cease repressing its own people: Ignored. Resolutions 686 and 687, demanding the return of prisoners from Kuwait and elsewhere: Ignored. Resolution 1373, demanding that Iraq cease sheltering and supporting terrorist organizations. Ignored.

There are at least a dozen more such resolutions on the record, all of them worthless. The most egregious lapse, of course, is the UN's failure to hold Saddam to his promises to destroy his chemical and biological arsenals and to abandon his attempts to develop nuclear weapons. The litany of ineffectual Security Council "demands" that Iraq co- operate with UN arms inspectors makes depressing reading.

There is nothing the least bit shocking or revelatory in any of this. It may be news to the Canadian government that Iraq is a major sponsor of international terrorism, but it cannot have been to anyone else in the room. Mr. Bush did not need to provide fresh "evidence" to make the case for bringing Iraq to heel. He had only to cite the UN's own statements.

In effect, Mr. Bush was calling the multilateralists' bluff. The United States may be the great threat to the concert of nations on the editorial pages of The Toronto Star, but in fact it is the combination of Iraq's duplicity and the UN's complicity that has done the most to loot the idea of its credibility. And now, here was Mr. Bush, offering the UN the chance to gain some of it back, by approving the use of force to back its demands.

And it will: Mr. Bush would not have issued the invitation if there were any doubt of that.

Indeed, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, as much as endorsed Mr. Bush's stand in his own remarks to the General Assembly, calling upon the Security Council to "face its responsibilities" if Iraq's defiance continues.

Nor should there be any doubt what this will mean. The chances that Saddam will act in such a way as to satisfy the United States' concerns are precisely zero, since amongst those concerns is his continued hold on power. And Mr. Bush was equally clear that, if the UN would not act to enforce its own resolutions, the United States would. It would act with the UN's co-operation if it could. But it would act without it if it had to.

You may say that he left the organization no choice but to go along. But you could also say he has shamed them into it. After the catalogue of Iraqi violations Mr. Bush has presented before the world -- specific, concrete, and unabated -- a refusal to act now would expose the UN as a sham.

It was, after all, to meet such threats to the peace that the United Nations was brought into being, after the failure of the League of Nations.

Now it faces a choice. As Mr. Bush put it, "Are Security Council resolutions to be honoured and enforced or cast aside without consequence?

"Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?" For, as he might have added, a regime that has lost its legitimacy will lose its power.