Made up of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, the group issued a joint statement that reversed President Bush's startling endorsement last month of the Israeli government's plan to keep some major Jewish settlements on the West Bank and its intention to bar Palestinian refugees from returning to Israel.

The Quartet's correction of Bush's deliberate reversal of longstanding U.S. policy received the attention it deserved. But a more nuanced change involving the venue of the meeting went unnoticed. The Quartet was originally supposed meet in Washington, but diplomatic sources in New York said it was switched to Manhattan to give U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan more of the limelight.

That last minute switch reflects another reversal. The Bush administration has gone from publicly portraying the United Nations as irrelevant to desperately seeking its help in Iraq.

Without U.N. backing, the Bush administration's scheduled handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government on June 30 will be chaos. With U.N. involvement it will be no less chaotic, but at least there will be the world body to share the blame.

So it makes sense to keep Annan as much in the picture as possible.

Washington is seeking U.N. help in three areas -- the formation of that elusive interim government so that it will have an administration with which to interact on June 30; a U.N. resolution that sets up some form of peacekeeping that allows the Bush administration to end the coalition of the willing before it becomes the coalition of the unwilling and disintegrates; and -- once the United States is nominally no longer in charge -- Iraqi general elections.

The special United Nations envoy to Iraq, Lakdhar Brahimi, has proposed that a caretaker government should take over from the U.S.-created Iraqi Governing Council. Brahimi has strongly recommended that no member of the hugely unpopular IGC should transfer to the caretaker government, which should be composed of technocrats.

"Though it will not be easy, we do believe that it will be possible to identify a group of people respected and acceptable to Iraqis across the country to form this caretaker government," Brahimi told the U.N. Security Council recently.

Brahimi recently returned from a trip to Baghdad with a lengthy list of possible candidates for the new government. An unidentified U.S. State Department spokesman told the New York Times, "We're in sync with Brahimi. We're eager to get a government up and running as soon as possible."

But European diplomatic sources in Washington said that although the United Nations is supposed to be responsible for this undertaking, the process has been slowed down by U.S. insistence on vetting all the names -- and objecting to many of them.

There is also a specific dispute over the future of Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite Muslim member of the IGC widely reviled by Iraqis. As far as Brahimi is concerned, Chalabi doesn't have a future in Iraqi government, U.N. sources tell United Press International.

But Chalabi still enjoys strong support in neo-conservative circles in Washington, including in the Defense Department. Far from removing him from office, some officials in the Bush administration are talking of making him an Italian-style president of Iraq, with largely ceremonial duties.

As for elections, the head of the U.N. electoral assistance division, Carina Perelli, repeated her earlier expert assessment Tuesday that nation-wide voting would not be possible before January. This suits the Bush administration, which most observers agree has lost control of the political process in Iraq.

Perelli even adds a large qualifier: "If the security situation does not improve, one of the things that is clear is that the United Nations will not participate in making these elections," she said. "Neither would we advise any nascent institution to go into elections that will not really represent the will of the people."

If the question of who will organize free elections in Iraq once the United States formally ends its occupation remains disquietingly open, a solution to the peacekeeping problem is even more so.

This is partly because the precise nature and extent of the U.S. handover remains as clear as a foggy morning on the Potomac. "What we don't know is the size of the American fig leaf," one Western diplomat said Thursday. "Is it going to just symbolic or something bigger?"

More than 130,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for what Pentagon spokesmen usually refer to as "the foreseeable future."

At the same time, reluctance is growing within the coalition to keeping troops in Iraq beyond June 30, although some governments have said they would be willing to roll over the deployment under a U.N. umbrella. The Bush administration is also in the middle of a "recruiting drive" through Europe and Asia, so far with only very modest results.

American soldiers, moreover, are reluctant to don wear blue U.N. helmets, or take orders from anyone but an American general officer. So any peacekeeping formula will have to have joint or overall U.S. command.

Without a sizeable addition of troops from other countries, the U.S. presence will be spread more thinly than ever. According to U.N. and other sources, there is a growing feeling that this is one instance when the so-called "Afghan model" will be copied.

Baghdad, like Kabul, will be secure under joint U.S.-U.N. control, as will some strategic areas such as the oil fields. A huge U.S. diplomatic build-up is in progress in the Iraqi capital. Newly appointed Ambassador John Negroponte will have a staff of thousands, and many see him as the reincarnation of the present U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.

In the rest of the country, however, it will be another story.

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