6.4 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, mid-2001
to January 2003
“… The FCO
are content for activity to be centred on MOD to preserve the
best
prospect
for dialogue with US DoD. All scoping activity would be confined to
the
minimum
number of named individuals.”
196.
Sir Kevin
Tebbit explained to the Inquiry that: “At this early stage … April
2002,
we did
not know whether the Americans were going to go for a military
option and, if so,
which one.
So this was very, very preliminary ground
clearing.”117
197.
An MOD-led,
inter-departmental group of senior officials, headed by Lt
Gen
Pigott, was
established in April 2002. That body, which came to be known as
the
Pigott
Group, considered issues related to UK participation in a US-led
ground
offensive
in Iraq.
198.
In spring
2002 the Pigott Group was the FCO’s principal forum
for
contributions
to cross-government consideration of post-conflict
Iraq.
199.
Mr Peter
Ricketts, the FCO Political Director and FCO member of the
Pigott
Group, took
responsibility for Whitehall consideration of the UK’s desired
“end
state” for
a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
200.
On 25 April,
Mr Peter Ricketts, the FCO Political Director, informed Mr
Straw’s
Private
Office, Sir Michael Jay and a small number of other senior FCO
officials, that the
MOD had
established “a small group of senior officials and military
planners [the Pigott
Group] to
think about the issues that would be involved in any military
operation in Iraq,
as the
basis for initial contingency planning in the MOD”.118
Participants
included the
FCO,
Cabinet Office, JIC and Intelligence Agencies.
201.
Mr Ricketts
described the Group’s work as “a sensitive exercise”. Participation
was
being
tightly restricted and paperwork would be kept to a minimum, but it
was “important
that the
FCO was involved from the ground floor with MOD
thinking”.
202.
The first
meeting of the Pigott Group took place in late April. Mr Ricketts
reported
that it had
covered “mainly the political context, including the implications
of the
Arab/Israel
crisis, attitudes in the Arab states, the risks of Iraq
disintegrating and the
consequences
of that”.
203.
The meeting
also considered how to define the objective, or “end state” of
a
military
operation:
“As we
found in the run-up to the Afghanistan operation, defining the
objective of
an
operation is crucial since this defines the scope of the operations
and hence
the scale
of military effort required. The MOD had tried their hand at a
definition of
the ‘end
state’ which was discussed at length, and I undertook to produce a
further
version.
117
Public
hearing, 3 December 2009, page 15.
118
Minute
Ricketts to Private Secretary [FCO], 25 April 2002, ‘Iraq:
Contingency Planning’.
147