President George W. Bush will face UN criticism of the policy of pre-emptive strikes when he tries to convince the nations to share the burden of occupying and rebuilding Iraq.
The president returns to the 191-member General Assembly a year after telling the United Nations it risked becoming irrelevant if it did not take a stand against Iraq.
But he has no plans to apologise for the chaotic situation in Iraq and the failure to find the promised weapons of mass destruction, given as the main reason for the war, US officials said.
Minutes before he addresses the assembly, Secretary-General Kofi Annan will take an unusually blunt swipe at the world's only superpower, saying unilateral military action without UN authority risks returning the world to the law of the jungle.
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"My concern is that, if it were to be adopted, it could set precedents that resulted in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification," Mr Annan warns in his prepared text.
According to Mr Annan, side-stepping the United Nations in waging war calls into question the entire structure of collective action forged when the United Nations was created on the ashes of World War Two.
"We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded," Mr Annan said.
Mr Bush, whose job approval ratings have been in a deep slide due in part to his Iraq policy, also plans to call on the United Nations to solve such global challenges as weapons proliferation, Afghanistan reconstruction, the AIDS crisis, hunger and slavery.
He will meet French President Jacques Chirac, who led a diplomatic campaign in March to deny Washington UN blessing for the war, as well as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who set tough conditions for contributing peacekeepers.
The United States is working on a new UN resolution aimed at attracting wider support for postwar reconstruction in Iraq and easing the strain on US occupation forces who are under daily guerrilla attack. But critics of the Iraq invasion are pressing for more concessions.
Mr Chirac has criticised a draft of the resolution, circulated to the 15-member Security Council, for not turning over at least symbolic sovereignty to an Iraqi governing council, then transferring power gradually over six to nine months.