The Bush administration’s announcement yesterday that it wants to grant the United Nations greater roles in peacekeeping and in forming a new government in Iraq marks an important change in U.S. policy for the better. The proposal, in the form of a U.N. resolution, could draw badly needed aid to Iraq and reassure the Iraqi people that the United States is serious about achieving peace there.

Iraq offered no better example of the contradictory mission undertaken by the United States than the funeral this week of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the groups working with U.S. forces to create a postwar government. At the funeral, Ayatollah Hakim’s brother, Abdel Aziz Hakim, demanded the United States leave Iraq and he demanded increased security.

The Bush administration certainly would like to meet both, but how? A larger role for the United Nations is one way. It could provide more resources and more troops while deflecting some of the scrutiny of each decision by the Bush administration. But the problem goes deeper than that. Neither the administration, which now quietly admits it did not plan properly for postwar Iraq, nor the Iraqi citizenry knows what they want Iraq to look like in a year or five years.

This lack of clarity prevents competing groups from working together – in Baghdad, Shiites question Sunni motives; in Washington, Defense is hostile to State. Time is running short for U.S. influence and the number of casualties climbs steadily. There are no simple answers of what to do, no formula of what would work to stop the guerrilla attacks that are causing so much chaos, although some experts say double or more of the 140,000 troops currently there are needed.

What is clear is that if the United States were to depart without ensuring that a fair and stable government remained, it could well leave the Iraqi people in no better condition than they faced before the war. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in response yesterday to a question about what the United States was doing to stop terrorism in Iraq, said removing Saddam Hussein eliminated the largest source of terrorism. That is pointed rhetoric, but it is not useful to Iraqis who do not feel secure now.

According to news reports, it remains unclear how much authority the administration is willing to cede to the United Nations – the U.S. military is said to remain under Pentagon command in the proposal. But the administration appears to have made a substantial concession, one that recognizes prewar assumptions about Iraq were dangerously wrong. That is a valuable step toward solving the multitude of often-contradictory problems in Iraq.