President George W. Bush at his news conference last week stuck to his determination to turn sovereignty over to Iraqis on June 30 despite existing insurgencies and hostage-takings. Almost off-handedly, he left it to the United Nations to help figure out just upon whom that sovereignty might be bestowed.

In agreeing to have the U.N. play a larger role in the shaping of Iraq's political future, the President began to back away from his policies that earlier had sought apparent rather than substantive U.N. participation.

The U.S. all along had wanted the endorsement of international support -- political, financial and military -- for its policies without diminishing its practical domination of influence.

Two days after the President spoke, Lakhtar Brahimi, the special U.N. envoy to Iraq, had his proposal accepted in general terms by the U.S. His plan is to replace the American-picked Governing Council with an interim government selected by the United Nations that would hold the fort until elections created a permanent government. The prominent virtue of this proposal was its mitigation of American control that had come to be regarded as undermining the credibility of the Governing Council.

Reflecting the tensions within the Bush Administration, the State Department and the White House were more receptive to this proposal than the Defense Department, whose proteges play a large role on the Governing Council.

It is not at all clear that the plan would be doable in time for a June 30 turnover of sovereignty, or that it would itself attain support among the people sufficiently to resolve fundamental conflicts among the Shiites, who constitute by far most of the people in Iraq, their customary Sunni Arab adversaries and the non-Arab Kurds.

Furthermore, the indispensable condition that violence in Iraq would be subdued remains absolute. It is at the heart of any effort to establish Iraq as a cohesive nation that would respect the human and political rights of its citizens, including its considerable minority populations, and, unlike Saddam Hussein's regime, would not threaten its neighbors or the wider world.

U.S. ambitions for Iraq becoming a beacon for reform in the Arab world went off the tracks precisely a year ago, in the days after President Bush proclaimed the end of major hostilities.

The rioting and sabotage that created chaos in Baghdad and throughout the country, unimpeded by the just-arrived and too meager American forces, exposing a vulnerable population to mayhem and the destruction of much of its infrastructure. This was cavalierly written off by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as little more than a liberated people letting off of steam after decades of repression.

In fact, as time has demonstrated, it began to vitiate the welcome many Iraqis felt for the American forces that had freed them from Saddam's oppression and to undermine efforts to pacify and rebuild the country. Too much of the population has distanced itself from the U.S. led coalition as the insurgency gained strength.

Whatever mechanism will eventually facilitate the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, stability and security are the ineluctable pre-conditions for success.

As no other countries appear either willing or able to send troops to Iraq to help suppress the insurgency and then maintain the peace, it is up to the United States. The alternative is to pull out and leave Iraq as a cauldron of conflicts that inevitably would restore the country as a menace. That is to say, it is not an alternative at all.

Harry Rosenfeld is editor-at-large of the Times Union. His e-mail address is hrosenfeld@timesunion.com.