6.2 |
Military planning for the invasion, January to March
2003
282.
Similarly, if
Mr Hoon had received a handwritten document of the
nature
described
by Sir Kevin, the Inquiry considers it is more likely than not that
he would
have
remembered it, even after a number of years. The Inquiry therefore
accepts that
Mr Hoon
did not receive it.
283.
There is no
evidence that Sir Kevin spoke about the need for a
collective
discussion
with Sir Andrew Turnbull or with other Permanent
Secretary
colleagues.
284.
Regardless
of whether or not Mr Hoon was provided with specific
advice
about the
need for a collective discussion, it should have been clear to him
from
the advice
he did receive, which is set out in this Section and Section 6.1,
that
a
significant change of direction was proposed and that there were
major issues
to be
addressed.
285.
Sir Kevin
Tebbit would have been right to advise in January that
Ministers
should have
paused for a full discussion of the policy on Iraq, the risks of
success
and
failure, the advantages and disadvantages of different options, and
the
implications
of the decisions taken.
286.
As Section
7 sets out, decisions of this importance, which raise a
number
of
challenging questions, are best addressed by a Cabinet Committee on
the basis
of
considered inter-departmental advice.
287.
Such a
collective discussion should then have been reported to
Cabinet
before the
deployment was announced.
288.
As Section
9.4 shows, Cabinet did discuss the decision to deploy to
Helmand
in May
2006, in January of that year.
289.
The absence
of planning and preparations for the UK role after the
conflict
is
addressed in Section 6.5.
290.
In
mid-January, Lt Gen Reith and Gen Franks discussed the role UK
forces
might play
in combat operations.
291.
Gen Franks
wrote in his memoir that in January, only a small group of
senior
CENTCOM
officers knew “significant aspects of the evolving concept” and
only four
people had
the “full picture”.100
292.
On 17 January,
Major General David Wilson, Senior British Military Adviser
at
CENTCOM,
reported to Lt Gen Reith on a conference chaired by Gen Franks
for
100
Franks T.
& McConnell M. American
Soldier. HarperCollins,
2004.
427