By NNN-KUNA
Washington : The United States has said that the structure of Iraq’s government is a matter that should be decided by the Iraqi people.
In an overwhelming bipartisan support, the Senate adopted Wednesday a resolution to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions managed by a weak central government in Baghdad.
State Department deputy spokesperson Tom Casey said Thursday that this resolution “does not have particular binding or legal effect”, noting that any decision in that regard “would be made by the Iraqi people”.
“It is obviously up to them to determine what kind of structure they wish to have for their government,” he added.
On a separate matter, Casey said that the US security firm Blackwater carried out over 1,800 convoys since January of this year, and only “very few of those have involved incidents of the use of force on the part of our contractors”, noting however that he has no statistics on the exact number.
The Blackwater incident is still creating a debate in Washington, after the contractors fired shots on Sept 16 on a score of Iraqi civilians, killing 11 of them. A media report released Thursday said that Blackwater has the highest rate of using violence between government contractors in Iraq.
Casey concluded that Blackwater does not provide security for the State Department only but to many other government agencies in Iraq.