6.4 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, mid-2001
to January 2003
27.
Dr Wilson told
the Inquiry that academics, the UN and its agencies, NGOs and
the
Arabic
media were also sources of information.
28.
Lord Jay, the
FCO PUS from 2002 to 2006, told the Inquiry that the FCO had
only
a “partial”
picture of what was going on in Iraq.18
He
highlighted the critical role of an
Embassy in
understanding a country:
“… we did
not have first-hand knowledge of what was going on inside Iraq, of
how
Saddam
Hussein and his government operated.
“We had it
second- or third-hand from other powers to whom we spoke …
[W]hat
we did
not have was the … constant day-to-day contact between
well-qualified,
Arabic-speaking
diplomats in Baghdad able to report back constantly on the
ebb
and flow
of power and influence and what that meant for us.
“… [Y]ou
really do need people on the ground feeding stuff back. If you
don’t have
that, you
are going to make mistakes.”
29.
Lord Jay
agreed that, in the absence of first-hand information, No.10 looked
to the
UK’s
intelligence services to provide advice on a broader range of
issues than normal.19
“I don’t
think we had thought through as much as we should have done what
the
implications
were going to be of an invasion of a country such as Iraq … I
wished
we had had
a better understanding of what Iraq was like in the 1990s, early
2000s
before a
decision was taken to invade.”20
31.
Mr Edward
Chaplin, FCO Director Middle East and North Africa from 2002 to
2004,
characterised
UK knowledge of what happened inside Iraq as
“patchy”.21
He told
the
Inquiry he
could, nevertheless, draw on a number of useful sources of
information: the
British
Embassy Amman, which held a “watching brief”; contacts with exiled
Iraqi groups
in London
and Washington; contacts with close allies, like the French, who
had long
experience
of, and still had representation in, Iraq; contacts in a number of
academic
institutions;
and contacts with journalists.
32.
Mr Chaplin
commented:
“... I
don’t think we lacked for sources of information, but I think one
of the problems
is that
actually nobody outside Iraq, including Iraqi exiles, quite
realised how broken
Iraqi
society had become … nobody really had that
information.”22
18
Public
hearing, 30 June 2010, pages 8-10.
19
Public
hearing, 30 June 2010, pages 12-13.
20
Public
hearing, 30 June 2010, page 67.
21
Public
hearing, 1 December 2009, page 39.
22
Public
hearing, 1 December 2009, page 67.
119