The Report of the Iraq Inquiry

270. Ms Short chaired a meeting with Ms Sally Keeble, DFID Parliamentary Under

Secretary of State, and DFID officials on 23 April, to discuss DFID planning and support

for ORHA.155

271. Ms Short agreed a suggestion from Mr Chakrabarti that other departments should

be given access to the £60m announced by Mr Brown in his 9 April budget statement to

pay for their secondments to ORHA. That would mean that they, rather than DFID, would

have to pass the Treasury’s tests on value for money and effectiveness.

272. A DFID official suggested that DFID needed to develop a “game plan for the

coming weeks and months”, to help DFID’s planning, enable it to influence the

wider international system and to help agree roles and responsibilities within the UK

government. Ms Keeble agreed that such a plan could be useful, but stated that DFID

“would need to be very clear that all parts of such a plan which related to DFID were

owned and managed by us, and not by No.10 or a Cabinet Office structure we could not

trust”. Ms Short agreed, noting that aiming for a cross-Whitehall plan risked producing

an end result that did not tally with DFID’s view on its own or others’ roles.

273. Ms Short stated that DFID “should not start from a presupposition that we

would work with ORHA, but begin by looking at the tasks which needed to be achieved,

and within that framework whether it made sense to engage with ORHA”. The first

priority was to establish law and order, which was a task for the military, not ORHA.

Second was immediate assistance, a task for the ICRC rather than ORHA. The third

priority, paying wages, was a task for ORHA and the UK needed to understand their

plans, but key recovery issues, including financing needs, would emerge from the IFI

needs assessment.

274. Ms Short concluded that DFID needed “one or two people” within ORHA to act as

DFID’s “eyes and ears”. DFID “should not bow to external pressure to put people into

ORHA for the sake of it”, but test each proposal individually.

275. On 24 April, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), advised

the AHMGIR that the US planned to divide Iraq into five sectors.156 The UK military would

lead one sector, comprising four provinces in south-eastern Iraq. That was “manageable

… provided that other countries offered troops to work with us” and the UK could take

on a fifth province “if others contributed the necessary forces for it”. The southern region

of ORHA would follow the boundaries of the UK’s sector.

276. Ministers agreed that “the size of the UK military sector will depend on the

permissiveness of the environment and the extent of other nations’ contributions, but

the current assumption was that it would comprise four, or possibly five provinces in the

South”. The MOD was instructed to report progress at the next meeting.

155 Minute Bewes to Miller, 24 April 2003, ‘Iraq: 23 April’.

156 Minutes, 24 April 2003, Ad Hoc Group on Iraq Rehabilitation meeting.

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