The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
637.
The official
recommended that, given the difficulty in identifying any
direct
commercial
benefit to the UK and the high cost of the contractors, UKTI should
not
agree to
the US request to extend the contractors’ contracts.
638.
Discussions
within UKTI and between UKTI, the FCO and DFID failed to
identify
further
funding for the posts.416
639.
In November
2004, in response to Mr Blair’s suggestions that the UK
needed
to find
more effective ways of getting the US to spend its funds more
quickly and
with
greater impact, Mr Benn explained that Mr Bill Taylor,
the US head of the Project
Contracting
Office (PCO), which had taken over some of the functions of the
PMO
after the
transfer of sovereignty in June 2004, “has declined our offer of a
senior
reconstruction
specialist but we are offering technical help instead” (see Section
10.2).417
640.
Witnesses to
the Inquiry offered contrasting views on the success of the UK’s
effort
to deploy
the right people to the right positions in Iraq.
641.
Sir David
Richmond told the Inquiry that the CPA generally received the
people it
needed from
the UK:
“I think
we did pretty well on that … [T]here was a sort of little bit of a
generation
gap,
perhaps inevitably, given the security circumstances, in that you
got a large
tranche of
relatively young people, because they were single and didn’t
have
families
and children to worry about … We also had quite senior people,
whose
families
had grown up, again less concerned. So there was sort of a missing
middle
to some
extent, but I think that’s probably inevitable in the
situation.” 418
642.
Mr Bearpark
was less sanguine. He highlighted the effect of the
imbalance
between
military and civilian numbers. Because civilians could not cover
all the meetings
taking
place each day that were relevant to their work, “99 military
planners are going
away
saying, ‘DFID is useless’ and only one of them is admitting that
DFID does actually
know what
it is talking about”. That systemic problem had been resolved very
quickly in
Bosnia in
1994 and 1995:
“… whatever
your limited civilian resource is … it must match exactly into
where you
insert it
into the military machine. If you can only afford one person, that
person has
to be the
equivalent of the Commanding General. If you can afford three
people, you
can place
them two ranks down, and if you can only afford one junior person,
that
person must
be on the personal staff of the Commanding
General.” 419
416
Minute UKTI
[junior official] to PS/Mr O’Brien, 13 August 2004, ‘UK
secondees in the Project and
Contracting
Office (PCO) Baghdad’.
417
Letter Benn
to Blair, 10 November 2004, [untitled].
418
Public
hearing, 26 January 2011, page 78.
419
Public
hearing, 6 July 2010, page 97.
354