Building a better UN: yes, we need it. But we need it to be more effective than it has been. Can the UN fix itself?(United Nations)

IF ONE HAD ASKED THE LEADERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS to choose a test case through which they could demonstrate the organization's efficacy before the world, they would hardly have chosen Iraq. With a volatile security situation, too few peacekeeping troops, and a recent political history that has bitterly divided the members of the UN Security Council, Iraq is just the kind of politically charged, high-risk intervention that has recently overwhelmed the UN in places like Bosnia.

But Iraq, of course, with a strong push from the Bush administration, has chosen the UN. With the U.S. occupation officially over as of June 30, Iraq is the most watched postwar nation-building challenge in the world today--and, almost certainly, in the UN's 59-year history. "It's the highest-stakes issue out there," says Mike Pan, a former adviser to the UN chief prosecutor in Sierra Leone and currently a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. "If the UN can't be useful to the U.S. here, when will the UN be useful?"

Note the phrasing there--"useful to the U.S." It says a lot about the reality of the UN's role today. Confronted with ever-expanding threats of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and a global AIDS crisis, the UN does not have the resources or the internal consensus--to work alone. It needs the United States. And the United States needs the UN as well. The disintegration of postwar Iraq has shown that Washington, for all its sole-superpower status, can win the war militarily only to find itself losing the peace. Even the most unilateralist White House in decades has begun to see that reality.

Can the two institutions, as currently constituted, work together? It won't be easy. By the time you read this, the UN will have replaced the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority as the kinder, gentler face of the Iraqi occupation. Its mandates are to bring into existence the Iraqi interim government and to organize the January 2005 national elections. But looming in the shadows from Baghdad's presidential palace will be the mammoth new 1,700-person U.S. Embassy, along with some 150,000 U.S.-led forces on the ground and Army Major General David Petraeus overseeing training of the new Iraqi security forces. The United States, while promising to stay out of the political process, has already thrown elbows at the United Nations, specifically at UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. Though President Bush promised to respect Brahimi's selections for the post-June 30 interim government, in late May the now dissolved Iraqi Governing Council conspired with Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer to elevate council member Iyad Allawi, a longtime recipient of CIA patronage, to the top post in the interim government, then publicly announced its support for Allawi before the UN's Brahimi had come to a final decision.

The Iraq War--its run-up, its duration, and its aftermath--showed us a bellicose American …