The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) has made a very sensible and sober speech. On Uganda, the International Development Committee has had several meetings with members of the Ugandan Parliament, who have lobbied and briefed us on the sad situation in northern Uganda. The Lord's Resistance Army has committed a number of atrocities over the years - not least kidnapping children, tearing them from their families and turning them into child soldiers. That is a war crime. The message that we have been given is that the Lord's Resistance Army recognises that it has nowhere to go. Through mediation, it wants to find a solution with Kampala and President Museveni. There is a nuance here for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There is a danger that we may be too keen on reform, which would allow us to have some success stories in Africa. We are perhaps too generous to President Museveni. We do not apply as much pressure on him as we might do on other countries. If there is to be progress in northern Uganda, it will be achieved by getting people around the table to try to find a solution to disarm the LRA.

The hon. Members for Bristol, West and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley) made some interesting points about intervention. This is my only thought about that: against the background of recent events, many countries in the world would see discussion of reforming the UN charter to make it easier to intervene as perhaps making it easier for the coalition to intervene when we want to do so.

May I give a domestic example of the sensitivity surrounding the matter? Next year, Parliament is due to host the annual Inter-Parliamentary Union conference. It is a significant event in our Parliament's life and that of the IPU. I have just returned from an IPU meeting in Cancun, which was held prior to the World Trade Organisation conference. I was surprised and distressed to hear that the Zimbabwean Government have made it clear that they want to attend the IPU conference next year. The Speaker of the Zimbabwean Parliament, who is a member of ZANU-PF, will lead their delegation. Unsurprisingly, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has made it clear that, in accordance with the EU sanctions in relation to Zimbabwe, if he applies for permission to travel to the UK, it will not be granted.

Everyone in the House is concerned about the situation in Zimbabwe. When the International Development Committee recently visited southern Africa, we concluded that Mugabe's actions in Zimbabwe had turned a difficult situation for southern Africa into a humanitarian disaster. A significant number of other African Parliaments have asked the secretary-general of the IPU to attend a special meeting in Geneva, where they will request that the venue for next year's conference be moved from London to somewhere else because they say that who attends IPU conferences should be a matter for them, and not for the UK Government. In other words, they are showing "solidarity" with Zimbabwe rather than facing up to the problems that President Mugabe and his Government are perpetrating against their own people.

That is disappointing. Those of us who are firm believers in the New Partnership for Africa's Development and in peer pressure in Africa find it particularly disappointing, but it is a fact of life. I sympathise with and support many of the approaches described by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush, but we must recognise that, against the background of recent events, there is hypersensitivity about what UN intervention currently means.

We all know why the Government chose to hold a debate on the UN today. Government business managers and the Prime Minister know that the vast majority of Labour party supporters and - I suspect more importantly - of people in the country instinctively support the UN. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly important for the Prime Minister to justify why two members of the UN went to war against a third without clear and explicit UN approval. The coalition finds itself in a bind. There is a desperate need for more troops in Iraq to enhance security, to facilitate reconstruction and to enable rotation of existing troops, who have been serving in extremely difficult conditions for a long time. However, without explicit UN endorsement, nations such as India and Brazil have made it clear that they are not willing to commit troops to Iraq. On the other hand, the United States has made it clear that it will not support any UN resolution that gives greater or further authority to the UN in Iraq.

It is surprising that the UN has not played a vital role so far in Iraq given the Prime Minister's commitment:

"We are of course agreed, as we say in our joint statement, that there will be a vital role for the United Nations in the reconstruction of Iraq".

I do not dispute that the UN has played a humanitarian role in Iraq, and we have heard today about the tragic consequences of it to many brave individuals who work for it. However, by no stretch of the imagination can that role be described as vital. That is surprising because the "we" in the quotation refers to the Prime Minister and President Bush. They made that statement not once, but twice - first at their summit meeting in the Azores and secondly when they were together at Hillsborough castle in Northern Ireland. It was also made at a joint press conference between the Prime Minister and the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in mid-April 2002.

Serious questions are being posed over the US Administration's ability to do everything themselves. The International Herald Tribune reports that the Pentagon believes that the military occupation of Iraq is currently costing $4 billion every month and that the figure will rise dramatically to $20 billion next year. The New York Times on Tuesday observed that President Bush's $87 billion request for post-war costs is heavily weighted to maintain military operations, with some $65.5 billion going to the armed forces. It also notes that the $87 billion price tag makes the package the most expensive post-war military and civilian effort since the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after world war two. The figure must also be combined with the $79 billion that was earlier approved by Congress during the war.

To put the matter into context, what has been spent already in Iraq is, in today's dollars, 25 times the amount to American taxpayers of what was spent in the 1991 Gulf war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The New York Times observed yesterday that there had been a substantial earlier miscalculation. The Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Congress appropriations committee in March:

"We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon".

Alan Larson, the Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 4 June:

"Iraq will rightly shoulder much of the responsibility".

Their views rested on two assumptions: that the Pentagon would be able to reduce its presence quickly and that Iraq was reasonably well developed. Both assumptions were wrong and, as a consequence, President Bush has now had to ask Congress for $87 billion.

That is a substantial amount, especially in comparison with the amounts that are spent on development aid in continents such as Africa, but the need to spend the huge sums unquestionably explains President Bush's overtures to the UN Security Council. According to the New York Times, it amounts to

"one of the most significant changes in strategy since the end of major combat in Iraq".

Moreover, the paper said that

"fuller UN involvement would not only reduce the cost in American lives and dollars - it would also improve the chances of success".

How are we going to get British troops home from Iraq? There was a time when the Labour party believed unquestionably in the United Nations. After its 1964 election victory, Harold Wilson appointed Hugh Foot, later Lord Caradon, to become the UK's ambassador to the UN, with an executive seat on Cabinet Committees. So much importance was attributed by the Wilson Government to the UN, that Hugh Foot was a hybrid between an ambassador and a Minister.

The Government have abandoned their support for the UN. What we hear and have heard today is the mantra that the UN needs reforming, yet it is always unclear what that reform involves. A lot is said about reforming the Security Council and increasing its size, but for a long time there has been no dispute that it needs to expand to include countries such as Japan, India and Brazil.

Does reform of the UN mean altering its charter? Last week the UN Secretary-General gave an interview to the Financial Times, in which he said that

"we need to look at the way the international peace and security architecture is structured and functioning ... We have to be able to adapt our institutions",

and that should

"not exclude reform of the Security Council."

Kofi Annan tends to be cautious in his assessments, but I suspect that his normal optimism has been shaken by the debilitating Security Council rows over the Iraq war. I understand that he has written to 191 world leaders asking them to attend the UN General Assembly meeting later this month to debate its priorities. I understand that the US President, George Bush, the French President, Jacques Chirac, and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schr�der, are among 90 leaders who have agreed to attend. So far the UN has said that the UK Prime Minister will not be there. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister tell us whether the Prime Minister will attend that special session of the UN General Assembly, along with other Heads of Government?

The fundamental question is whether we believe that it is in the world's best interests to try to achieve results and solve problems together. If so, we should surely do all that we can to reinforce and support the UN. In recent years, the International Development Committee has been concerned with many issues, including the HIV/AIDS crisis and climate change and its impact on poorer countries. We concluded that there would be a greater change in the next 100 years than there was in the last 300,000. We also considered food shortages in the horn of Africa and southern Africa, where each year more people are dependent on food aid. None of those challenges to the world will be resolved by individual countries however powerful they are. Going it alone is not an option.

The Minister should ask his private office to put in his weekend box the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, which has an extremely good article by Madeleine Albright - the US Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001 - entitled, "Bridges, Bombs, or Bluster?" She quotes a senior US statesman who said, immediately after 11 September, that

"this most recent surprise attack [should] erase the concept in some quarters that the United States can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism, or in anything else, for that matter."

That was a quote from George H. W. Bush, the United States 41st president.

In contrast, President Bush - the 43rd president - offered his own perspective shortly before going to war with Iraq. He said:

"At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America."

As Madeleine Albright observes in her article:

"The best rebuttal Washington had to qualms about regime change was that military force was the only way (in the absence of effective UN inspections) to enforce the council's resolutions and thereby strengthen both the UN's credibility and international law. Unfortunately, the Bush administration made its eagerness to pull the plug on chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team transparent and billed its preemptive war doctrine as a replacement for international law. As a consequence, much of the world saw the invasion not as a way to put muscle into accepted rules, but rather as the inauguration of a new set of rules, written and applied solely by the United States."

That follows up my concern about changing and strengthening the rules on intervention. The actions of the coalition have led many countries to believe that it will be intervention not on the UN's terms but increasingly on those of the coalition and the most powerful nations in the world.

During the week before the war, the International Development Committee happened to be in New York and Washington and we met senior members of Congress, the president of the World Bank, the UK ambassador to the UN and many other permanent representatives at the UN in Washington and New York. On the return flight to London, the Select Committee unanimously wrote to the Prime Minister and much of the content of our letter still stands. The Committee told him that it had become clear from the meetings that

"the fracture of the international community over Iraq is the most serious since the end of the Cold War. Unless immediate steps are taken to heal these rifts, the poison of mistrust and antagonism will run deep to the detriment of the world ... Some are criticising the United Nations for failure in the period leading up to war. But it was the nations of the Security Council that failed to find consensus over a second resolution. It is wrong to blame the professional agencies of the United Nations which must play the key peace-building role now."

Of course no one pretends that there was a halcyon golden age of UN co-operation to which we should return. My first memory of an international political crisis was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which was resolved with the help of the UN - despite President Kennedy's doubts about the UN - because it was a convenient forum for both Russia and the United States to resolve the crisis and save face. However, when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, the UN could do nothing to defend the people of Czechoslovakia.

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the UN has been at the forefront of assisting in nation building, encouraging democracy and promoting conflict resolution. In truth, the UN can only be as good and as effective as the manpower and resources committed to it and its agencies by its member states.

By and large, if the UN has been given the authority and the resources, it has done a good job; if it has been denied authority or adequate resources, it has understandably failed to perform or to perform as well as it might. One simple example of this is the UN special court in Sierra Leone. I spoke this week to one of the chief prosecutors on the special court who said that it is "really Alice in Wonderland" that Nigeria, which is on the management committee of the special court, has given asylum to indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia. Surely Nigeria's granting of asylum to Taylor cannot be consistent with its international obligations.

Instead, however, of the special court being strengthened, the opposite appears to be happening. One needs only to consider its financing. This week, the special court had to explain to a delegation of Canadian parliamentarians that, in two months, the court would have to start to issue redundancy notices as it would be wrong to do otherwise in the absence of further funding. The Minister has justifiably praised the work of the special court, because it has worked far faster than the special courts in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, our Canadian parliamentary colleagues found that situation crazy when contrasted with the speed, efficiency, diligence and professionalism with which they saw the special court discharging its work.

I do not challenge the assertion that the UK Government have been generous in their funding of the special court but I hope that our approaches to other countries will bear fruit in ensuring that its work can be carried out. If the international community cannot succeed in simply indicting and bringing to trial those responsible for the worst war crimes in west Africa, what hope is there of the international community prevailing elsewhere?

It is further notable that Kofi Annan's comments to the Financial Times described the response of the international community to conflicts in parts of Africa as

"hesitant and tardy ... We continue to lack the political will, as well as a vision of our responsibility in the face of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes occasioned by conflict".

However, the real issue is not the need to reform the United Nations but how the United Nations functions in a world with only one superpower, which clearly believes that there are actions that must be taken to protect its citizens and homeland and that the role of the UN is superfluous to those needs or at worst a serious impediment and at best an organisation simply to co-ordinate humanitarian and other assistance. That is the crux of the international community addressing criticisms from within the UN of the international community.

I have been struck on recent visits to Washington in discussions with colleagues, members of the Congress and the Senate and Americans generally by the extent to which, since September 11, they perceive the United States as being an island under attack by terrorists - those, known and unknown, who wish to hurt the United States and her citizens. Perhaps understandably, they are simply resolved to do whatever they consider is necessary to protect America. If there are others who are willing to go along with them in doing what they feel to be necessary, well and good; if not, they will do it on their own. The difficulty with that approach, as Iraq shows, is that it has clear limitations. Even a nation as powerful as the United States on its own - its defence spending next year will be greater than that of the rest of the world combined - cannot prevail in Iraq even with the support of key allies such as the United Kingdom.

I hope that the Prime Minister and the United Kingdom Government will use such influence as they have to seek to persuade President Bush that, whatever the United States understandable desire to go it alone, we need to act together as an international community if we are effectively to contain rogue states such as North Korea. We need to enhance, not undermine, the status of the United Nations.

Furthermore, we should not allow history to be rewritten. The United States frustration with the United Nations over Iraq was because the United States believed that there would not be a second resolution, and that France would veto a crucial motion on attacking Iraq. It is clear, and it is to the Prime Minister's credit, that he did everything possible to try to get a second resolution, which he would not have done unless he felt that it was necessary. If anyone doubts that, it is worth their reading Peter Stothard's book "Thirty Days". It was intended to be 30 days in the life of the Prime Minister when he became 50, but it coincided with the lead-up to the war in Iraq and its outbreak. What caused the Prime Minister to abandon his support for a second resolution was that he knew that the United States would go to war against Iraq regardless of whether the second resolution was passed.

France made it clear that it would not support the attack on Iraq because it did not believe that there was sufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction to justify it. Given what we know now, was France so wrong in that assessment? In truth, if they knew then what they know now, how many Members of Parliament, on both sides of the House, would have withheld their support from the Prime Minister in the crucial vote on 18 March on going to war with Iraq?

The issue is not the need to reform the United Nations but the need to recognise that the international community working together is better than some countries working on their own. Still the most effective means that we have to give a purpose, assent and reality to the international community is the United Nations. Evidently, by returning to the United Nations for help in Iraq, President Bush has eaten his earlier words about the UN's irrelevance. His actions are a clear reminder of the UN's indispensability, even to the one country that sees itself as indispensable, but that will not necessarily make the institution any more effective. To regain its status, the UN will have to show itself ready to tackle, multilaterally, an Iraqi crisis on which the USA and the UK have made a start. Therein lies a serious problem, because it would be unfortunate if the upshot of the current Security Council negotiations for a new resolution on Iraq were simply to slap a UN label on a US-led military force.

Doubtless, longer-term issues remain, to which the UN Secretary-General alluded to this week. I suspect that the publication on Monday of the UN's report on progress towards its 2000 millennium declaration goals will give the Secretary-General the opportunity to raise many of those issues, one of which is the UN's view of the balance of threats facing humanity. The UN has been unfairly criticised for its usefulness in the fight against weapons proliferation and terrorism, but the Secretary-General was right to remind us that, for most countries, the real scourges are the old ones - famine, poverty and disease - and that specialised agencies of the UN combat those daily. Therefore, if there is to be reform of the UN, that will be pointless unless it is matched by the commitment of every member of the international community to those UN agencies and to the UN as a whole. If that were to start to happen, the USA, the UK and others would find the UN's edicts would then carry much wider legitimacy and credibility.