13.1 |
Resources
Minister
and the Cabinet and that there would be no financial barrier to us
doing
what was
necessary to be done.121
182.
Mr Blair
described the Government’s planning for a post‑Saddam Iraq in
his
14 January
2011 statement to the Inquiry. He wrote that, on
funding:
“… the
Chancellor [Mr Brown] had throughout made it clear resources
would not
be an
obstacle. The Treasury had made certain calculations of the cost
both of the
initial
action and the aftermath. The Chancellor was present at Cabinet
meetings in
the run‑up
to the conflict. Throughout he made it clear resource was not a
constraint.
Subsequently
he was part of the War Cabinet. Of course the Treasury queried
and
questioned
costings. They always did. But at no point did anyone say to me:
the
Treasury
are stopping us doing what need. So I see in evidence to the
Inquiry that
resource
issues were being raised with some frustration by officials. I can
only say
that had
such frustrations been raised with me, I would have acted on them
and
I believe
the Chancellor would have been fully supportive.”122
183.
A Treasury
official sent Mr Brown a paper on the global, regional and
local (Iraqi)
economic
impact of “war” in Iraq on 6 September 2002.123
The
official’s analysis of the
global
economic impact of war is described earlier in this
Section.
184.
As part of his
analysis of the local (Iraqi) economic impact, the official
assessed
the
contribution that the IMF, the World Bank, bilateral donors, the UN
and the Paris
Club
(through debt relief) had made to meeting the “post‑war challenge”
in the Federal
Republic of
Yugoslavia (FRY), East Timor and Afghanistan, under five
headings:
reconstruction;
institution‑building; economic stabilisation; economic transition;
and
peacekeeping.
185.
The official
concluded that the cost of “putting a country back on its feet”
could
be high.
The FRY had already received US$10bn in support (excluding IMF
support).
Iraq could
be “even more expensive”, given:
•
the
possibility that a conflict could cause significant damage, and the
existing
poor state
of Iraq’s infrastructure;
•
the need to
stabilise the economy, including by addressing Iraq’s huge
external
debt;
121
Public
hearing, 5 March 2010, pages 25‑26.
122
Statement,
14 January 2011, pages 15‑16.
123
Email
Treasury [junior official] to Bowman, 6 September 2002, ‘What Would
be the Economic Impact of
a War in
Iraq?’ attaching Paper Treasury, September 2002, ‘What Would be the
Economic Impact of War
in
Iraq?’.
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