History is written by the victors, and so are postwar settlements. UN Security Council Resolution 1483 gives international endorsement to the US occupation of Iraq for at least the next 12 months, hands the control of Iraq’s oil income and production to Washington and finally legitimizes the Bush assault upon Saddam. No wonder the Syrian government could not bring itself to have its UN ambassador present at the vote.

At a stroke Washington would seem to have it all. The provision in the resolution for UN involvement in the formation of an Iraqi government is meaningless. The most senior members of the world’s international parliament — Russia, France, China and Germany — have rolled over and given in. They have abandoned their principled stand for further UN weapons inspections, along with their opposition to a US-led attack. Now their focus would seem to have changed sharply to having their country’s contractors pick up as much lucrative Iraqi reconstruction work as possible.

The UN has no credible role in the immediate future of Iraq. In truth it has probably never seemed less relevant. Yet observers who are already writing off the organization should stay their pens. History will very likely show that the UN’s humiliation of 2003 may actually have paved the way for its triumph not many years hence. Once Saddam was ousted and the US had assumed its messy but undeniable control of Iraq, further Security Council opposition to US belligerence became both dangerous and pointless. Washington ignored its counsels before the war, when there was a high degree of risk. It is hardly going to start listening now that it has won. Had Bush’s UN opponents continued to reflect the worldwide revulsion at US aggression, they could have caused Washington to dump the UN altogether, maybe even threaten to sling the organization out of its comfortable New York headquarters. Anyone who thinks such a move unthinkable should realize by now that this is a White House that is coming to specialize in the unthinkable.

By going with the punches, accepting a nonpivotal role overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq and the future of the Iraqi people and by ceasing, for now anyway, awkward questions about the location of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the UN is allowing itself to live to fight another day.

It still does not seem to have dawned on Washington that its troubles in Iraq have only just started. For the Bush White House, winning a push-button war was even easier than eating a pretzel. However, coping with the challenges of reorganizing such a diverse and complex society as that of Iraq is of a very different order of magnitude. Once the Iraqis recover their poise and basic creature comforts and come to understand the nature of their occupiers, their attitude is going to change. The Americans are likely to make no better job of reordering this society to their satisfaction than the British, their current junior partners, 70 years ago.

Yet when things go wrong, as they will, Iraq will hopefully not plunge into disaster under American rule. Standing in the wings within the country, bruised but still working, will be the United Nations, and Washington will be overwhelmingly grateful to be able to abandon its mandate back into UN hands.