United States President George W Bush on Wednesday called upon the United Nations to lift the sanctions imposed on Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power.

Welcoming the decision of Iraqi representatives at their first meeting on Tuesday to build Iraq as a democracy, Bush, who was addressing Boeing workers building the F-18 Super Hornet fighters in St Louis, said that having rid Iraq of an oppressive regime, the US is committed to helping Iraq build a future of freedom and dignity and peace.

Bush said that for all the hardships of the transition, the lives of the Iraqi people would be better than anything they have known in generations.

"We believe that people across the Middle East and across the world are weary of poverty and repression and yearn to be free," he said while pledging friendship to all those who worked and made sacrifices for freedom.

"Our country and our allies," he said, "are united by a great goal: We are working to create conditions for peace. We are confronting the threats to peace from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

On the war itself, Bush said that organised military resistance has virtually ended in all the major cities the US-led forces have liberated but "Our work is not done, the difficulties have not passed but the regime of Saddam Hussein has passed into history."

"There is still scattered enemy resistance capable of doing harm to the coalition forces and to the innocent but we will stay focused, we will press on until our mission is finished and victory is complete."

From Kabul to Baghdad, said Bush, American forces and America's fine allies have conducted some of the most successful military campaigns in history. "We are redefining war on our terms," he said.

Bush pointed out that even before the fighting began in Iraq, US Special Forces were inside the country, moving in to protect the infrastructure and the oilfields owned by the Iraqi people and to secure vital bridges.

PTI