British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said today Iraq must be handed back to its people after the war and called for an "appropriate" and important UN role in the country.
"It's not about the UN running post-war Iraq, it's about the Iraqi people running post-war Iraq," he said ahead of talks between NATO and EU foreign ministers with US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell.
"We're advocating that the country should be handed over to the Iraqi people," he said.
The question of UN involvement in post-war Iraq is causing transatlantic tension. The EU wants the UN to take a "central" role, but the US administration appears divided on the issue, with hawks saying the United States should remain for a while in charge in Iraq.
Mr Straw recalled that a summit of British, US and Spanish leaders in the Azores just before the outbreak of war had agreed "that of course there should be United Nations involvement".
He cited the experience of Afghanistan as a possible model for how the Iraq could be run after the war. After the 2002 war which drove out the Taliban, Afghanistan had evolved "very rapidly to a situation where you had the Afghan people in power through an interim authority," he said.
AFP