The "handover" is about as genuine as the puppet governments that every now and then got set up in Vietnam.

It's not jusat a public relations gimmick though - it's also a ploy to provide a pseudo-legal basis for signing agreements and so forth that will limit the power of any genuine Iraqi controlled government in the future to reverse commercial arrangements deigned to cream off Iraqi resources for the benefit of foreign companies, especially those in the Bush camp.

If there was a prospect of a genuine handover to a caretaker Iraqi administration free from American control, and restricted from agreeing anything that can't be undone by a democratically elected Iraqi government, that would be something that the rest of the UN Security Council could reasonably be expected to back. Except that Bush would probably use the USA veto to stop anything like that.