The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
•
Notwithstanding
the lack of legal obligation, the UK should mark and clear
up
expended
surface but not sub-soil DU “on an opportunity basis”.
555.
The Annotated
Agenda stated that the UK was assisting explosive clearance
by
providing
information, advice and £5m in DFID funding to UN agencies and
NGOs.
The MOD was
providing information on sites where DU had been used to
international
agencies
and local communities.
556.
Ministers
agreed that:
•
Environmental
issues should be factored into overall policy towards Iraq and
that
the UK
should consider part-funding the UNEP assessment.
•
The UK
should tackle depleted uranium (and unexploded ordnance) “on
the
basis of
the scale of risk posed to the Iraqi population, but clear up
depleted
uranium
from the surface”.298
Mr John
Buck deployed to Iraq at the end of May 2003, as the CPA’s interim
Director of
Strategic
Communications.
He provided
an assessment of the CPA’s communication effort on his departure
from
Baghdad at
the end of June.299
Considerable
progress had been made. A single structure
had been
established and a single information campaign (focusing on getting
the Iraqi
people
accurate messages about key CPA policies on security, the economy,
and
infrastructure
and salary payments) had been agreed. The major challenge was to
ensure
that this
new structure was fully staffed; a successor to Mr Buck had
not yet been nominated.
Mr Buck
told the Inquiry that, at the time he left Iraq, there was an
“embryo” of an effective
CPA media
operation.300
However,
from his perspective as the new FCO Director Iraq,
that
operation
subsequently became much less effective:
“… it was
something we [the FCO] agonised over a lot, but it was never
something
that we had
a great deal of control over, and I think part of the problem was
that over
time during
the autumn, the focus of the US became very much the
Presidential
elections.
So the whole focus of the media operation became far more domestic
…
relaying
back to the US what was happening [rather] than actually
communicating
with the
Iraqi people.”
Mr Andy
Bearpark, CPA Director of Operations and Infrastructure, echoed
that assessment,
and also
set out the danger of not communicating effectively with the Iraqi
people:
“At that
stage … the CPA strategic communications effort was entirely
directed at the
American
people. So there was an enormous effort to explain back to the
States what
was
happening, but zero effort to explain to the Iraqi people what was
happening.
298
Minutes, 3
July 2003, Ad Hoc Group on Iraq Rehabilitation
meeting.
299
Telegram 53
IraqRep to FCO London, 25 June 2003, ‘Iraq: CPA: Getting the
Message Across’.
300
Public
hearing, 31 January 2011, page 101.
98