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UK urges patience over Iraqi constitution

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Aug 30, IRNA
UK Straw-Iraq Constitution
The British government Tuesday urged patience with regard to the wrangling over Iraq's constitution, pointing out that similar processes in the US and Northern Ireland had taken years to complete.

Following a week of missed deadlines on settling a new constitution and ending with Sunni leaders in Iraq rejecting the final draft, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that such
constitutional processes "always produce arguments."
"If you certainly look at the history of the United States, if you look indeed across the water into Northern Ireland, where we are in a sense involved in a constitutional process, you see where you have people, opposed communities, trying to come together, the process is difficult," Straw said.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC's flagship current affairs program, Today, he insisted on the importance of the UN's role in the process, despite international disagreement over military action.

"Every right-thinking person across the world and all responsible members of the United Nations take the view that it's in their interests and in the interests of international peace and security to have a constitutional process that produces a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq," the Foreign Secretary said.

He emphasized it was "a UN-backed, and in many ways led, process, not a unilateral US-UK process."
Asked whether the policy followed after the 2002 invasion had produced the right kind of atmosphere for negotiating a constitution in Iraq, Straw admitted that some mistakes had been made.

"We didn't get everything right, and I don't think anybody could have got everything right in the circumstances immediately after the military action," he said.

"One of the things we didn't predict was the speed with which the Saddam regime would collapse," he admitted, but defended the policy as being essentially correct.

The decisions taken were "overwhelmingly more right than wrong," he said, while suggesting that the extent of violence in Iraq was not wholly due to the way in which the country was governed under Saddam.

HC/1430/1412