UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 18 — A mood of skittish uncertainty has descended on the leaders of the United Nations. They are eager to overhaul their institution, but worry whether any change can give it the freedom it needs to survive without being seen as either a lackey of the United States or an easily swattable gadfly.
The bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last month has, however, also made the secretary general, Kofi Annan, more aggressive. He is more nervous about putting his people in harm's way, particularly if they are operating with an ambiguous mandate, but he is increasingly insistent that member states end a decade of dawdling and remake the institution to fit the geopolitical realities of the 21st century.
Mr. Annan, who says he will outline plans for reform as the annual General Assembly gathers next week, has said that only "radical" revisions in the institution are likely to preserve it. Iraq has shattered any global consensus on handling security issues, and, as last week's meeting in Cancún showed, there is no consensus on trade issues.
It is already clear that events since Sept. 11, 2001, have cost the United Nations dearly. The fundamental assumption of its neutrality has been supplanted, at the fringes of the Muslim world, with the assumption that the United Nations is simply a stalking horse for the imperial ambitions of the United States.
Two weeks after the Baghdad bombing on Aug. 19, the United Nations public relations personnel in the Arab world gathered here to brief Mr. Annan on this growing perception. Salim Lone, the communications director of the Baghdad mission and a survivor of the bombing, said, "It was clear to many of us in Baghdad that lots of ordinary Iraqis were unable to distinguish our U.N. operation from the overall U.S. presence in the country."
"This perception is growing in the Middle East," he said. "Extremists prosper from that, which is why I am afraid that a terrible line has been crossed by this bombing and given other groups a new terror option."
Europeans today view the United Nations as the embodiment of international law and world order. The United States seems to view it as a tool to be used when handy. Africans and Asians tend to have more case-specific uses for United Nations diplomacy and its general advocacy for the poor and disadvantaged who are not much in the minds of rich nations.
But for United Nations officials, many of whom have never worked anywhere else, the bottom-line question remains how to relate to the United States.
"The worst fear of any of us," said Shashi Tharoor, an under secretary general whose entire career has been spent at the United Nations, "is that we fail to navigate an effective way between the Scylla of being seen as a cat's paw of the sole superpower and the Charybdis of being seen as so unhelpful to the sole superpower that they disregard the value of the United Nations."
Mr. Annan believes that one problem is that the United Nations does not reflect the world as it exists today. The Security Council, he argues, must be enlarged, with new members added to both the group of 10 elected nations that serve two-year terms, and the group of five permanent members that hold veto power: the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.
The General Assembly, he said, needs to remake itself so that it does not simply pass "lowest common denominator" nostrums. "We started with 51 member states and we are now 191 member states," he noted, but "the structure of the Council has not changed."
In public forums and in worldwide news outlets, Mr. Annan has been hammering home his points, saying, with soft-spoken passion, that the global security infrastructure is broken, and if it is not fixed right away, it will be too late.
The United Nations, whose $1.2 billion budget supports three major regional headquarters outside New York, supports more than 9,000 employees worldwide and dozens of peacekeeping and relief missions. Its usefulness — in places from Kosovo to Liberia — is not widely disputed, but its raison d'ętre is.
American ambivalence over the institution has come into focus over Iraq. The question is now being asked: is it worth bringing the United Nations into more of a substantive partnership role in Iraq's political transformation?
The Bush administration is facing a lot of international skepticism. Despite the recent decision to turn back to the United Nations for its imprimatur on the forced remaking of Iraq, many here fear that the United States may step back yet further from the creed of multinationalism hewn to by presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and treat the organization merely as a necessary evil.
The latest draft resolution on Iraq being circulated by the United States reflects a continued wariness. Instead of offering the United Nations the role of midwife to a new government, which it played in Afghanistan, or the more direct administrative role that it had in East Timor, it calls on Iraqis — specifically the Governing Council created under the auspices of the United States and Britain — to be the midwives of their own future, and to set the timetable for the restoration of Iraq's political rebirth as a sovereign nation with a constitution and a democratically elected government.
The resolution, as originally crafted, still leaves the United Nations in the role of facilitator, not decision maker, with the job of "providing humanitarian relief, promoting the economic reconstruction of and conditions for sustainable development," and "advancing efforts to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance."
Such language seems unlikely to satisfy the French and Germans, who see the United Nations at the center of balanced world governance. The French dislike the degree of American power being exercised today around the world, and the American tendency to skirt, isolate or ignore multilateral institutions.
Meanwhile, the vicious, small conflicts that the great powers are sometimes reluctant to confront continue to flare, these days in Central and West Africa. At the root of them is often a pure economic conflict, like the possession of diamond mines set against a backdrop of failed development schemes.
A significant body of American opinion, particularly conservative opinion, is that the United Nations has been ineffectual in halting such conflicts.
In most such situations, said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "the story of United Nations efforts to play a security role has been a story of failure, except in a significant handful of cases, like Salvador and the Sinai, in which there really was a deal made that all sides wanted to keep."
Overarching security issues, like nuclear proliferation, are trotted on and off the United Nations stage but never seem to be resolved by the United Nations itself.
In an interview less than a month before the Baghdad bombing, the former British envoy to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said the problem was not so much a growing misunderstanding of what the United Nations is, as a perpetual misunderstanding of what it can do.
"It sets the agenda on development, environment, rights, the way the world is going to look in the next generation," he said. "It's not a short-term fix organization. The U.N. doesn't have power unless those who have power switch it through to the U.N. as a matter of choice. But on the longer-term issues they are not in control. The U.N. provides the order on the long-term issues."
But it is the current short-term issue, Iraq, that threatens to shape the world body for the long term.