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British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Wednesday that as soon as possible, Iraq should be governed not by the coalition or the United Nations but by the Iraqi people themselves.
"Iraq at the end should not be run by the Americans, should not be run by the British, should not be run by any outside force or power, it should be run, for the first time in decades, by the Iraqi people," Blair told the House of Commons, or the lower house of the parliament.
Asked whether an interim government would be led by the United States or the United Nations, Blair said: "In the immediate aftermath of the conflict of course the coalition forces will be there."
"The United Nations has made it quite clear itself that it does not want to lead an Iraqi government, what it wants is the ability to work with us in partnership to make sure that we assemble the broadest possible representation from within Iraq itself," Blair added.
The basic principle is that any transitional arrangements and the Iraqi interim authority has got to be UN-endorsed, Blair told the lawmakers.
Britain, which firmly supports the United States in the run-up to this war against Iraq, has urged a strong role for the United Nations in rebuilding Iraq, without getting a positive reaction on this issue from the United States.
The Downing Street has denied suggestions that the British vision of the UN playing a leading role after the war appears to be at odds with statements from the American administration.
In another development, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw left London on Wednesday for talks on post-war Iraq in Berlin with his German counterpart Joshka Fischer later in the day.
He was then to meet with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov, as well as US Secretary of State Colin Powell during an emergency NATO meeting on Iraq, in Brussels on Thursday.
Straw, who on Tuesday called for an international conference to choose Iraq's new leaders, told the BBC Radio 4's Today Program earlier in the day that the plans for a post-war Iraqi government, as well as humanitarian efforts, were marking a "new phase" of relations with countries like France and Germany, which oppose the war.
(Xinhua News Agency April 2, 2003)
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