10.2 |
Reconstruction: July 2004 to July 2009
The Iraqi
Transitional Government (ITG), led by Prime Minister Dr Ibrahim
al-Ja’afari,
formally
took power in early May.165
The ITG was
mandated to govern Iraq until a
government
could be elected according to a new constitution in December
2005.
In his
account of the Occupation of Iraq and the transition to democracy,
Dr Ali A Allawi,
ITG
Minister of Finance and former IIG Minister of Defence, described
Iraqi people’s
expectations
of the ITG:
“The public
expected that the Transitional Government would immediately start
to
remedy the
services and security situations, and the message [delivered by
Prime
Minister
al-Ja’afari in the National Assembly] was that conditions would
rapidly
improve. A
realistic and cold-blooded assessment … would have led to a
different
conclusion,
one that might have been difficult for politicians to admit to, but
which
was
nevertheless necessary to make if the expectations of the public
were not to be
Dr Allawi
wrote that problems with the power supply added to the feeling of
“a country
under
siege”.167
Those
problems “could not have possibly been resolved in the
time-frame
of the
Transitional Government” and the fact that the entire sector did
not collapse “was
actually a
sign of success”.
290.
DFID officials
in London, Baghdad and Basra held a video conference on 17
May
to discuss
the I-CAP review.168
The
presentation made to the video conference by a
DFID
official set out a number of “conclusions”:
•
A
“de-facto” review had already been completed, in the form of the
exchange
between
Mr Blair and Mr Benn in October 2004,
Mr Chakrabarti’s visit to Iraq in
December
2004, the 2005 UK Strategy, the “smaller than expected” budget
for
Iraq, and
increased life support costs.
•
The process
could have been much better. There should be a better process
for
next year’s
review.
291.
The official
subsequently reported to Mr Anderson that the video conference
had
agreed that
the I-CAP review had “essentially been completed”. Work was now in
hand
to produce
a text for publication, after agreement by Mr Benn. The
process had been
driven by
events and had not been ideal. The official set out in detail the
better review
process
that should be undertaken the following year.
292.
Mr Blair
and President Bush spoke by video conference on 19 May.
Mr Blair’s brief
for the
conversation advised that the electricity situation in Iraq was
“parlous” (six hours
165
Daily
Telegraph, 3 May
2005, Iraq’s new
government sworn in.
166 Allawi
AA. The
Occupation of Iraq: winning the war, losing the
peace. Yale
University Press, 2007.
167 Allawi
AA. The
Occupation of Iraq: winning the war, losing the
peace. Yale
University Press, 2007.
168
Minute DFID
[junior official] to Anderson, 19 May 2005, ‘ICAP
Review’
243