Barrister Harun Ur Rashid, a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva, said in an article published Tuesday that this is a moment of truth for the United States that its great allies and NATO partners France, Germany and Turkey deserted the United States. "They deserted because war against Iraq without the UN is illegal and immoral," he added.

Condemning the United States for "completely undermined the concept of collective security incorporated in the UN Charter," Rashid said it has turned the international security system into turmoil and no one knows its consequences.

Multilateralism to global security issues "will receive a deadly blow" as it is embodied in the universally recognized acceptance of the UN Charter, the former Bangladeshi diplomat hold the view.

The United States will increasingly find itself isolated from mainland Europe and the Franco-German-Russian axis emerges a counter-point to the United States in international security system, he said.

This is a critical moment of the post-Cold War era where a new world order is in jeopardy by the declaration of war, he said, warning that the US action may initiate "the New World Odour," that will smell even more malodorous than that of during the Cold War era."

Describing the UN-led war on Iraq as "man-made disasters," BrigM Abdul Hafiz, former Director General of the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies, pointed out that at stake is not just the future of Iraq and its people but that of the planet itself and a balance in which it is sustained.

The whole edifice of an order painstakingly built up by the world leaders through the ages "is now on the verge of being torn down," international law contemptuously violated and the world body, the UN, rendered irrelevant, he said in an article published Tuesday.

Never has one nation combined so much of power and so much of arrogance and lack of responsibility, so much scientific knowledge and so much contempt for the rest of the world, he said, adding that hopes of a new dawn in human history after the demise of Cold War was thus cruelly dashed.

(Xinhua News Agency March 25, 2003)