WASHINGTON (AFP) - The UN chief would consider resuming a political role in Iraq if security there improves and power is quickly transferred to an Iraqi government that includes members of the deposed Baath Party, UN sources told The Washington Post.

"You need to bring them back into the political process, you need to tell them that at some time in the future they can compete like any others in the political process," Ghassan Salame said in an interview published Wednesday.

"The secretary general ... wants more people in the government," said the senior aide to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. If they are unwilling to participate, he added referring to members of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, "let them refuse to join."

He also said the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani should also be included in the broader provisional government.

Annan is seeking support from the United States and other UN Security Council members for a plan that would turn over power to a provisional Iraqi government within three to five months, while moving more deliberately to draft a new constitution and hold elections, senior UN officials told the Post.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell recently suggested handing over power to an elected Iraqi government next year, at the soonest. He envisioned the Iraqis drawing up a constitution within six months and preparing an election next year.

Salame, a former Lebanese minister of culture, said the U.S.-led coalition's decision after the war to dismantle the Iraqi army and exclude Baath Party members from the country's political life had "alienated" a large sector of Iraqi society.

"The Iraqis deserve at least what you have given the Afghans; that is, a provisional sovereign government," he said, referring to the power structure that followed the US-led war in Afghanistan in 2001.

Salame said Annan's proposal for Iraq was modeled loosely on the Afghan transitional government established after the Taliban militia was overthrown.