Maybe Saddam’s dead in the bunker. Maybe he isn’t. But one thing’s sure: The administration has to figure out how to create a new Iraqi government. Soon.

Having crushed the old one, the United States has taken on the responsibility for governing 24 million Iraqis. That responsibility is huge: After decades of dictatorship, there are no obvious new Iraqi leaders. And President Bush has made a staggering pledge to remake Iraq into a democracy.

Yet the White House now appears to grasp that an American military occupation — of the sort it has been planning — would soon turn ordinary Iraqis against U.S. forces. So U.S. officials are scrambling to figure out how to create an Iraqi Interim Authority that will give Baghdad’s new government an Iraqi face — even if the real power is wielded by Americans behind the scenes for a couple of years or more.

Creating such an authority is crucial, so U.S. officials can gradually turn power over to Iraqis. That would enable Americans to hightail it out of Baghdad before they become resented as colonial occupiers. But just creating an interim authority won’t save the administration from the occupation trap.

To succeed, an Iraqi Interim Authority (now called the IIA by U.S. officials) must have legitimacy, first and foremost in the eyes of its own people. That, in turn, would bring respect in the region and the world. If the IIA, on the other hand, appears to be a transparent American creation led by leaders handpicked by Pentagon officials, it will lack credibility from the outset.

For example, it doesn’t help when some U.S. officials appear to anoint Ahmad Chalabi to lead Iraq. The talented but controversial opposition leader was just airlifted by the U.S. military into southern Iraq with a 600-man militia.

How can an IIA acquire legitimacy? I can see only one way: have the United Nations convene an international conference, in Baghdad, as it did in Bonn to pick the new leadership of Afghanistan. Tony Blair has tried to persuade President Bush to adopt such an option, but so far the White House has ruled it out.

That is a mistake that will hurt both Iraqis and Americans. But so far the administration seems unwilling to address the legitimacy gap.

The plan at present is to convene a conference — possibly in postwar Baghdad — without U.N. sponsorship. Iraqi opposition leaders, such as the author Kenan Makiya, who are working with U.S. officials, propose that a Baghdad conference reconvene a 65-person congress of Iraqi exiles and local Kurds that recently met in northern Iraq. They would add another 90 to 140 regional and local notables from inside Iraq. The conferees would pick the interim authority and pave the way for a new constitution and future elections.

The U.S. objection against U.N. inclusion is obvious: Why involve the world body, when the Security Council opposed the war and U.S. policy in Iraq from the get-go? U.S. officials sneer that France, Russia and Germany want the United Nations to run postwar Iraq only so they can get some lucrative contracts for rebuilding the country and Iraqi oil fields.

But calling on the United Nations to convene a Baghdad conference to pick Iran’s new leaders is very different from giving the organization control over postwar Iraq.

Contrary to French President Jacques Chirac, top U.N. officials recoil from the prospect of running Iraq and its reconstruction. “Iraq is not East Timor or Kosovo,” says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The United Nations took over control of those territories when their respective rulers — Indonesia and Serbia — fled or were pushed out.

But Iraq is a viable country with a reasonably effective civil service that can run the country largely on its own. Iraq’s people would deeply resent being treated as a U.N. protectorate. Furthermore, many Iraqi Kurds and Shiites are bitter that U.N. officials collaborated with the distortions of Saddam’s government in running the oil-for-food program.

U.N. officials recognize these facts. The most important U.N. role — in Annan’s words — would be “political facilitation leading to the emergence of a new or interim administration” in Iraq. In other words, the United Nations would be the convener of a Baghdad conference. This wouldn’t mean that the United States didn’t have a major say in the makeup of the IIA.

According to James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat who represented the United States at the Bonn conference, there were intense consultations behind the scenes at Bonn among Afghans and all interested parties before a new Afghan government emerged.

The U.N. process produced a widely accepted Afghan government. Without a similar process, a new Iraqi government will face distrust abroad and possibly rejection at home as an American puppet .

“The United States could try to do it on its own,” Dobbins says, “but this would make it more difficult. I don’t think it would be very difficult to work with the United Nations on this.”

The White House should rethink the cost of going it alone.

— Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubinphillynews.com.