"It does not take a hard cynic to believe that Annan may decide that allowing Iraq to collapse into civil war would be a small price to pay to cut Bush off at the knees, flatten America's foreign policy endeavors, and raise the U.N. back to prominence in world affairs. It's not like he's lose HIS job for a failure, is it?"

Tom, I think you being a bit paranoid. Attempting to "flatten America's foreign policy endeavors" is not going to raise the UN "back to prominence". And this also assumes the UN was brought low by the US leading a coalition to change the Iraq regime. And perhaps it also assumes that US is not trying to strengthen the UN - or that the US is trying to keep the UN out of Iraq.
In a few months, the US is going to end it's occupation of Iraq, which doesn't mean it's going to pull out US soldiers, but does mean that the US and coalition will no longer retain the sovereign-like power of occupation and will transfer this power to Iraq leadership. How this leadership governs will be up to this leadership to decide, and dealing with the UN will be important aspect for this leadership. We have said the UN will play a major role in restoring Iraq and this is a major part of it.