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NEW YORK, Thursday (Reuters)

U.S. President George W. Bush will challenge the United Nations on Thursday to a high-stakes choice between taking action to enforce its resolutions on Iraq or risking irrelevance, U.S. officials said.

The blunt tone of the speech may leave some of the world leaders in Bush's audience "squirming in some of the seats," a senior administration official said.

"The president believes that the case he's going to make is strong, and that there's a clear choice here," another administration official said.

The official said the United Nations would "risk irrelevance" if it failed to act. That could leave the door open to the United States acting on its own, but officials said it was unclear whether Bush would make that link explicit.

Bush is scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly, where he will lay out his case for action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to an audience of world leaders who have been largely skeptical or opposed to a potential war against Iraq.

The White House said it would release on Thursday a 22-page, point-by-point rundown of what it said were Iraq's violations of U.N. resolutions.

Officials declined to say whether Bush would issue any sort of deadline or request a specific U.N. resolution, saying he still had options.

But they said the speech in part would amount to an indictment of Saddam for violating U.N. resolutions dating back to the 1991 Gulf War, after which Iraq promised to dismantle its weapons programs and submit to regular inspections.

"The world is a dangerous place, and the president is going to make clear that ... this regime (Saddam's) and this dictator is the most dangerous, and he'll lay out all the reasons," the official said.

A senior official said Bush would cite a "decade of defiance" by Saddam. "The U.N. has been ignored, and that is a problem for the United Nations," the official said.

Bush remained willing to consult with other leaders on what action to take against Iraq, officials said.

Bush's U.N. speech comes a day after the president commemorated the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and vowed to prevail in the war on terrorism he launched in the wake of the attacks.

Earlier Bush said Wednesday that America owed the victims of the September 11 attacks to safeguard civilization from "any terrorist or tyrant" armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Blending the mantle of mourner-in-chief thrust upon him by the attacks one year ago with his official role as commander-in-chief, Bush capped an emotional day of tributes with a mix of sorrow and defiance. "America has entered a great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve," he said in New York harbor. "We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish."

Without explicitly mentioning Saddam Hussein, Bush echoed language from past speeches in which he has firmly made the case for the Iraqi leader's ouster - something he was to do before the UN General Assembly on Thursday.

"We will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder," he vowed with a US flag flapping in the breeze over his left shoulder and the illuminated Statue of Liberty over his right.

"Americans will live as free people, not in fear, and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power," he said in the seven-minute televised address. "We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power."

The United States, its forces on high alert at home and abroad, on Wednesday solemnly and tearfully remembered the traumatic day one year ago when 19 young Arabs killed 3,025 people in a carefully planned assault on America.

Bush arrived at "ground zero" on a windy afternoon, the last stop on a mournful pilgrimage to all three sites where Americans and others from dozens of nations died last Sept. 11.

Accompanied by first lady Laura Bush, he laid a wreath in the empty space that once contained the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and hugged and comforted family members of victims.

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