With the handover of authority from Americans to Iraqis only five weeks away, President Bush intended his speech Monday to reduce widespread uncertainty about what comes next. It didn't really fill the bill.

Speaking before a largely military audience at the Army War College in Carlisle, Mr. Bush set out five general principles of what the United States seeks to achieve in the war-torn country. His view of the situation seemed simplistic given the situation on the ground, particularly as it pertains to security.

In addition, Mr. Bush marred his presentation by putting forward several contentions that were dubious in their logic and almost qualified as the same kind of inexactitude -- weapons of mass destruction, an Iraqi link to al-Qaida and the like -- that got the United States into the mess in the first place.

The five steps that Mr. Bush put forth: a declaration that full sovereignty would pass to a government made up of Iraqi citizens, starting July 1; an assurance that U.S. military force would remain in place, at the level of 138,000 or more if necessary, until stability and security are established; a commitment to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, including a new prison to replace Abu Ghraib; a pledge to seek international support, including a new U.N. Security Council resolution and NATO involvement; and a tentative timetable that includes free national elections by January 2005 to choose a transitional national assembly.

There is no question but that Mr. Bush set out what can be a useful game plan for walking the United States out the door of a better Iraq within a finite period of time, if it works.

But there were problems in his assertions. He said Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. If that is true, it is because he made it so. Iraq was not the central front in the war on terror on Sept. 11 nor between then and March 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq.

He said the armed resistance to American occupation in Iraq came from former members of Saddam Hussein's army. That is to leave out entirely the stiff Shiite resistance to American rule in the form of the Mahdi Army of cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The Shiites, a majority in Iraq, were longtime enemies of Saddam Hussein; the core of Saddam Hussein's army was for the most part Sunnis.

Mr. Bush said the war in Iraq has made the United States more secure. That is simply not true, if one takes into account the hatred of the United States engendered across the world and particularly among Muslims by the war in Iraq, events like the prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib facility and the collapse of the Middle East peace process.

He also cast little light on which Iraqis would receive the power turned over by the United States on June 30. It appears that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Iraqis he is consulting and American authorities will be involved in the selection. The United States and the United Nations will be unable to claim when the choice is made that the Iraqis are representative of Iraq, except perhaps as a cross section of the population. Their credibility will turn on this to a strong degree. Otherwise the Iraqis will see them as American stooges and probably try to kill them, as they have members of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose president they assassinated last week.

Americans are better off for the president's having tried to clarify his goals on Iraq. At the same time, there is reason to be troubled by the misleading information and ill-founded premises he included in the speech.