UN: United Nations Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan said yesterday that the UN will send a team to Iraq to help form a sovereign government in anticipation of the formal end of the US occupation on June 30th.
Mr Annan was speaking after a meeting in the White House with US President Mr George Bush who said that the UN had a vital role in Iraq.
Originally the Bush administration did not anticipate substantial UN involvement in the transfer of sovereignty, but has been forced to rethink its plan for US-controlled caucus-type elections after the Shiite majority demanded direct elections.
Mr Annan said the UN team would work with the Iraqis "in finding the way forward" and would talk to as many Iraqis as possible to "steer things in the right direction".
He said he hoped the electoral mission he was sending to Iraq would overcome obstacles to meeting a June 30th deadline for handing over power to Iraqis.
"I hope this team I'm sending in will be able to play a role getting the Iraqis to understand that if they could come to some consensus and some agreement on how to establish that government, they're halfway there."
He added that the US authority in Iraq had indicated it would accept the conclusions of the UN team, "so we do have a chance to help break the impasse".
Meanwhile US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell said yesterday that he did not know whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had been told it had no stockpiles of banned weapons.
"I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world," he said in an interview in the Washington Post. The "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get". History will ultimately judge that the war "was the right thing to do", Mr Powell said, as Iraq intended to acquire them.
Mr Powell put his credibility behind a presentation to the UN Security Council last February in which he stated the US case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, saying "what we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence".
Mr Bush is expected to name today the members of a commission to look at intelligence failures that led to war against Iraq based on a false assumption.