Ireland has "let itself down badly" as current chair of the UN Security Council, the former UN Assistant Secretary General, Mr Denis Halliday, said in Galway last night.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, could have taken several initiatives in response to the September 11th attacks on the US which made it clear that the United Nations still had influence and did not support an illegal military response, Mr Halliday said.
Instead, Ireland was one of many states which had been "purchased" by the US as it rushed to war, he claimed.
Mr Halliday, who resigned from his UN post in 1998 in protest at the UN embargo on Iraq, was addressing a meeting hosted by the Galway Alliance Against War in the city.
He said Mr Cowen could have demanded a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the legal context in which to respond to the attacks on the US.
Ireland in its UN capacity could also propose the establishment of a UN tribunal with wider terms of reference than the existing tribunals, he said.
Such a tribunal would be empowered to bring to court those charged with terrorist offences. These could include governments which supported or harboured individuals involved in such activities.
"To focus on one individual, Osama bin Laden, and to bomb a country without sufficient evidence is absolutely illegal under international law," he said. "The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, has already said that there is not enough evidence yet to convict bin Laden in court."
The military action in Afghanistan was "an outrageous breach of international law".
"We can turn a blind eye to Israeli attacks on Palestinians and react quite differently when Iraq invades Kuwait. We have to look at state terrorism, be it Israel, Russian attacks on Chechnya, US crimes in central America.
"The non-state terrorism we have witnessed is a response to the state terrorism which has gone before."
