The U.N.'s Role in Iraq

· Regional players. Neighboring states also should be engaged on their positions on the core agenda. The lead negotiator will need to determine which actors have leverage, with whom, and on what issues spoilers need to be isolated.

· Support. The United Nations must arrange a team of experts on issues such as oil and constitutional law to support the negotiations. It will be important to work out public information strategies, using local and regional television and radio outlets, to explain the U.N. role and mitigate attempts at disinformation from al-Qaeda and others.

Eventually a judgment must be made on whether to try for a major meeting to broker an agreement -- like the Dayton agreement for Bosnia. Such a meeting must orchestrate negotiations among an inner circle of key Iraqis while engaging in a more limited way a wider contact group of the neighboring states. The United States will need to sustain constant bilateral diplomacy throughout this process, coordinating at each step with the U.N. negotiator.

The desire for a political agreement should not result in accepting just any settlement. The negotiating team will need to determine whether Iraqi and regional commitments are genuine, adequate and sufficiently encompassing of the key players to be viable.

The United States also must stop deluding itself about fleeting military progress amid Iraq's wider political debacle. It should be made clear to Iraqis that if they will not take advantage of a credible multilateral process to reach a political compromise, then American troops cannot make a sustainable difference and will be withdrawn.

Carlos Pascual, former State Department coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, is vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Brian Cullin, assistant White House press secretary in the Clinton administration, is director of communications of foreign policy studies at Brookings.