Senator Edwards today proposed a global institution to fight terrorism through increased cooperation between nations that he said would make America safer where President Bush had failed.

Groups like United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization are ill-equipped for 21st century challenges, Mr. Edwards said, noting that the U.N. includes countries that promote terrorism, while NATO is primarily a military organization.

Mr. Edwards proposed group, dubbed the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization, or CITO, would focus on intelligence gathering and restrict membership to countries that pledge to fight terrorism.

“The international institutions of the last century were designed for World War II and the Cold War,” he said. “They remain essential to meeting our needs, but they cannot be the complete and final answer.”

The Democrat from North Carolina, who is pursuing his party’s nomination for president, chose a symbolic setting to make his counter-terrorism proposal, which was delivered in a speech just blocks from the site of the attacks of September 11, 2001, at Pace University in Lower Manhattan, four days ahead of the tragedy’s six-year anniversary.

The Democrat has called the “war on terrorism” a “bumper-sticker slogan,” drawing rebukes from Republican presidential contenders including Mayor Giuliani. And earlier this summer he criticized Senator Clinton and Mayor Giuliani for saying President Bush has made America is safer.

He repeated his argument today that America is not, citing a recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Al Qaeda is as strong as it was before September 11, 2001, and called post-invasion Iraq “one of the greatest generators of terrorism in the world today.”

Mr. Edwards avoided calling the struggle against terrorism a “war.”

Strength and cooperation would be the two guiding lights of his counterterrorism strategy, Mr. Edwards said. He vowed not to rest until America has captured the Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, and “served him justice.” He added that America must go beyond targeting individual proponents of terror to pursue “a broader, deeper goal – to prevent terrorism from taking root in the first place.”

“Millions of people around the world today are sitting on the fence, particularly in the Muslim world,” Mr. Edwards said, describing Mr. Bin Laden on one side and America on the other. “We have to be the country that’s worthy.”

Acting like a bully, he said, would repel Muslims toward Mr. Bin Laden. Instead, he said, America must set a standard for cooperation by reaching out to work with countries beyond longstanding allies such as Israel and Britain. Starting a CITO organization, which Mr. Edwards pledged he would do within six months in office, would be a first step to setting that example.

Mr. Edwards billed his initiative as the opposite of President Bush’s approach, describing his belief in “the power of partnerships, rather than going it alone,” and emphasizing the importance of civil liberties when waging intelligence investigations.

He said he chose to speak at Pace University because he wanted to pitch his ideas directly to young people, whom he encouraged to enlist in his cause by signing up for the armed forces or an intelligence agency; working for a non-governmental international development group; or learning to speak Arabic.

“It’s time for us as Americans, and for the young people of America, to be patriotic about something other than war,” he said.