France said the draft snubbed its concerns while UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in unusually strong language, said the text was moving in the wrong direction as the divided council again struggled to find common ground.

The United States wants the resolution to give UN backing for a multinational force to help keep the peace. France, Germany and Russia want an expanded UN role in Iraq and a faster handover of power to Iraqis.

"The revised text does not address our wishes," France's UN ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere said after the council's first meeting on the new draft. It "leaves the United Nations in a secondary role," he said.

"We didn't find the proposals that we made, along with Germany, on the main points."

France has pledged not to veto the measure, which Washington hopes will get nations to contribute cash and soldiers to share the burden in Iraq, where US troops are facing bloody guerrilla-style resistance.

But a high number of abstentions would be seen as giving only a tepid council mandate and not the robust backing the United States wants from the world body, whose support it did not win to launch the war.

"We are encouraged by what we see to be an emerging convergence among the 15 security council members," US ambassador John Negroponte said after the meeting.

He said the US proposal for a "progressive" transfer of powers -- with a constitution to be written before elections and then finally sovereignty -- was "sound and systematic."

"We're very much in favor of transferring them as rapidly as we possibly can," Negroponte said.

After a lunch with security council members, Annan reiterated his position that Iraqis should be given sovereignty first in order to let them work through the political process independently.

"You get rid of the idea that it is an occupation and cut back on the resistance," he said.

"That doesn't mean the international community walks away."

Along with the pace of a transfer of power, the council also remained divided on the UN's role in Iraq, where its Baghdad offices have been hit by two deadly suicide bombings since August.

UN chief Annan wants responsibilities in Iraq to be clearly stated -- in part so UN personnel do not appear linked to the occupation -- and guarantees on security after two deadly suicide attacks on the UN's Baghdad offices.