The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
976.
Mr Straw
told the Inquiry:
“The
interesting thing … was that from an early stage it was the Chief
of the Defence
Staff who
had argued very strongly that if we were going to get involved in
the
military
action, the Army had to be there, because they would be unhappy
and
cross if
they weren’t. I don’t trivialise the way it was put across … So we
could have
provided
facilitation and then go[ne] in afterwards, which would not have
meant
standing
down the troops we had in theatre and it was essentially what the
Spanish
and the
Italians did.”386
977.
Asked about
the weight he had attached to Adm Boyce’s advice on
morale,
Mr Blair
told the Inquiry that he had asked:
“… the
military for their view, and their view in this instance was that
they were up for
doing it
and that they preferred to be right at the centre of things … that
was my view
too. I
thought, if it was right for us to be in it, we should be in it
there alongside our
principal
ally, the United States.”387
978.
Mr Blair
wrote in his memoir that in late 2002, Adm Boyce had “said he would
have
a real
problem with the Army if they were not fully
involved”.388
979.
Asked about
Mr Blair and Mr Powell’s comments, Lord Boyce told the
Inquiry that,
“of course
the Army would want to be engaged in a war”.389
If they had
been unable to
deploy
because of the firefighters’ strike and:
“…
everybody else went to war you can imagine how they would have
felt. They are
trained to
fight. They are the most professional army in the world. They would
be
sitting
around and hosing down houses while the Marines, the Navy and Air
Force
would be
busy. What do you think they would think? They would be
disappointed
they
weren’t involved. So yes. It would have been untruthful of me not
to represent
that to the
Prime Minister which I did.
“It was not
a factor of saying if you don’t do this the Army are going to
mutiny or to
want to go
home or whatever. Of course not. It would be wrong not to
have
apprised
him of the fact that the Army would be dismayed if they
weren’t
engaged …
particularly having been as successful as they had been
during
Desert Storm
in 1991.”
980.
Asked whether,
in relation to Package 3, the Chief of the General Staff
had
been
reluctant to take on “yet another commitment” or was “nervous about
being left
386
Public
hearing, 2 February 2011, pages 105‑106.
387
Public
hearing, 29 January 2010, pages 60‑61.
388
Blair
T. A
Journey.
Hutchinson, 2010.
389
Public
hearing, 27 January 2011, pages 31‑32.
322