The United States should not go it alone when it comes to fighting terrorism, said Gillian Sorensen, former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations in a speech in Hughes Hall Monday.
Sorensen told AU students that the United States must work closely with the United Nations to find solutions to international problems.
"Even a superpower like this one - a big nation, a mammoth nation, with oceans on either side - needs to acknowledge that it needs the United Nations," Sorensen said.
Sorensen, who now serves as a senior advisor and national advocate for the United Nations, spent 12 years working as the United Nations' New York City Commissioner.
Sorensen told students that on Sept. 11, 2001, she watched the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center unfold from her office window at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
Sorensen said that after Sept. 11, the world felt a "wave of sympathy" for the United States, but this feeling of sympathy quickly dissipated largely because of American actions in Iraq.
There was a sense around the world that the United States was going to war in the wrong country and was not listening to the reports of the United Nations' weapons inspectors, she said.
"I was dismayed and astonished to find the United States becoming more and more isolated," Sorensen said.
The international community views the United States as the "bully on the block" and feels the country often says one thing and does another, she said.
"We can't pretend for a minute that when we say this and do that that the world is not taking notice," she said.
Sorensen said government leaders need to be more careful with their word choices when dealing with other countries.
When the United States labeled Iran as a "rogue" state and as part of the "axis of evil," it meant that the growing moderate group of students in Iran were crushed and allowed extremists to take over. The United States must be willing to talk to countries like Iran, Sorensen said.
"If you will never talk with your enemy, where does that get you?" she said.
Sorensen also said the war in Iraq was a "tragic mess of our own making" and said that because the United States went to war on its own, it will now bear the full burden of the consequences alone.
"No one can claim that democracy is thriving in Iraq or that it is a better place now than before we went in," she said. "I hope some day it will be."
The United States should make better use of the United Nations when dealing with issues like war and terrorism, Sorensen said. While the United Nations is imperfect, it is also indispensable, she said.
"Use it wisely and well and not just as an organization of convenience," she said.
