Issue date: 3/9/04 Section: News

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John D. Negroponte delivers a speech to a standing room only audience at the George Bush Presidential Conference Center Monday evening. Negroponte has served as a diplomat for 43 years and received his first appointment in 1960 from President Eisenhower. (Photo by ART WRIGHT / THE BATTALION )

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John D. Negroponte said Monday night that the United Nations, like the United States, is helpful in securing democracy worldwide.

"If the United States is necessary, but not sufficient to good things happening in the world, the same is true of the U.N.," he said.

Negroponte, who has been an ambassador since 2001, told an overflowing audience of 350 in the George Bush Presidential Library Conference Center that the United States never attempted to undermine the United Nations.

"A strong vigorous, democratically-disposed United Nations is in our national interest,"

Negroponte said. "This administration has never challenged the United Nations to weaken it; rather, it has challenged the United Nations in order to challenge it."

Negroponte said in a question-and-answer session that America was justified in going to war with Iraq without the U.N. resolution.

"(The resolution) did not say if we were to use force we have to go back for yet another resolution, it simply said that we would have to come back to consult the Security Council,"
Negroponte said. "As far as we were concerned, there were more ways than one that Iraq continued to not be in compliance."

Negroponte said that although no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, Iraq had missiles that were prohibited.

"I don't have any doubt in my mind that we were justified for what we did," he said.

Negroponte said U.S. troops that are now in Afghanistan and Iraq are defending the U.S. Constitution as well as democracy all around the world.

"We believe that not only is the national security of the United States good for us, it's good for the world, because we think democracy, modeled on our own constitution or not, is the best

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