The United Nations security council yesterday voted unanimously to expand its role in Iraq after four years in which it took a low profile because of security fears and hostility from the Bush administration.
The resolution, sponsored jointly by the US and Britain, marks an important turning point - at the very least, symbolically - for the UN in Iraq. The Bush administration, in the period before the 2003 invasion and in the immediate aftermath, expressed confidence it could run the country without UN help.
The neo-conservatives who dominated US policy at the time were openly hostile towards the UN. Washington's decision to call for UN help underlines the failure of the US to quell the violence or persuade Iraq's neighbours to play a positive role in the country.
The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was previously ambassador to Baghdad, insisted the vote represented "an important new phase in the UN's role in Iraq". He hoped it would be "a springboard to greater international support for Iraq's government and people".
The UN's new mandate opens the way for it to become involved in internal political reconciliation. The US would also like to see it hold a series of meetings in Baghdad with Iraq's neighbours, particularly Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, to try to persuade them to become more positively involved.
The US would like countries such as Saudi Arabia to at least open an embassy in Baghdad as a show of normalisation. But the Saudis, in spite of pleas from the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have so far agreed only to explore the idea.
Washington's hope is that the UN will have a better chance of acting as a moderator both internally and externally than the US has managed so far.
But the UN is still regarded with suspicion among some in Iraq, where it is blamed for more than a decade of sanctions before the invasion. The first major target of the insurgents in 2003 was the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the UN envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 other staff.
The UN, like the US, will find its scope for action severely curtailed by the weakness of the Iraqi government and the frequent risk of attack. The resolution authorises the UN mission in Baghdad to "advise, support and assist the government and people of Iraq on advancing their inclusive, political dialogue and national reconciliation".
This means trying to engineer a deal between Iraq's Shia and Sunni Muslims - an ambitious goal - as well as tackling the humanitarian crisis and organising more mundane but still awkward tasks such as carrying out a census. The new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, is regarded by Washington as more amenable to helping the US than his predecessor, Kofi Annan, who opposed the war.
Although the UN has wide experience in conflict resolution and tackling humanitarian crises, it will be difficult for it to have much impact in Iraq, given the scale of insecurity. The UN has only 55 staff in Iraq and the plan is to increase that by October to no more than 95.
The UN staff association this week called for no more staff to be deployed and for existing staff to be withdrawn because of the risks.
The British ambassador to the UN, Sir Emyr Jones Parry, expressed hope that the UN, which is based in Baghdad's Green Zone, will redeploy a contingent to Basra, where British forces are based.
The British government under Tony Blair repeatedly called before the war and afterwards for the US to allow the UN to be more involved in Iraq, but was ignored by the Bush administration.