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
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
“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