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6.4  |  Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, mid-2001 to January 2003
210.  Sir Peter Ricketts told the Inquiry:
“We [the Pigott Group] didn’t discuss military planning as such. We discussed
the implications of military planning for other departments’ activities … We worked
up in that group an end state which was one of the political implications of any
military plan.”121
211.  In early May 2002, the international effort to resolve the India/Pakistan crisis
was the FCO’s principal foreign policy concern and the major preoccupation for
Mr Straw, Sir Michael Jay and Mr Ricketts.
212.  Iraq policy was a lower priority and restricted to a small number of officials.
213.  Despite those constraints, it fell to the FCO to ensure that the military
contingency planning already under way in the MOD was placed in a wider
strategic context, and that it took place alongside analysis of non-military options
for achieving the desired end state in Iraq.
214.  There is no indication that senior FCO officials commissioned such work
during spring and early summer 2002.
215.  Mr Tom McKane, Deputy Head of OD Sec, was asked by the Inquiry whether the
Pigott Group had considered aftermath planning. He explained:
“There wasn’t from my recollection much, if any, discussion about the aftermath in
terms of infrastructure of the country, the security of the country, or humanitarian
or development assistance. That wasn’t the focus of these meetings, and I think
that it’s not really surprising, given that they were meetings being convened in the
Ministry of Defence and had quite a defence focus.
“… [T]he focus of everybody at that point was … what is the military plan going to
be? What is the form of the UK contribution likely to be? … [U]ntil one had … some
resolution on those points the question of precisely what the aftermath was going to
be was not something that could be settled.”122
216.  Mr McKane added:
“We had not got to the point at that stage of planning for an aftermath, because
there wasn’t yet an aftermath to be planned for.”
217.  In late May, the MOD Strategic Planning Group (SPG) advised that the post-
conflict phase of operations had the potential to add significantly to the costs and
scale of a UK military commitment in Iraq.
121  Public hearing, 1 December 2009, page 20.
122  Public hearing, 19 January 2011, pages 61 and 65.
149
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