6.4 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, mid-2001
to January 2003
263.
Mr Hoon also
recommended that officials from the MOD, FCO and Cabinet
Office
“do some
more homework urgently” to put Mr Blair in a better position to
influence
President
Bush and Dr Rice before they were briefed on an updated CENTCOM
plan
during
August.
264.
Sir Kevin
Tebbit advised Mr Hoon on 3 July that Ministers who had not
been
exposed to
the issues over the previous three months might “run a mile” from
the picture
of “a
military plan being worked up in a policy vacuum, with no strategic
framework”
and “no
clearly defined end state”.148
It might be
that an Iraq campaign was unlikely to
happen, but
that was not certain. If it did happen, the UK might not be able to
avoid
being
linked to a US military campaign. In those circumstances, it was
not responsible
for the UK
“to let matters run without greater active engagement designed
seriously to
influence
US conceptual as well as operational thinking”. The UK needed “some
early
careful
engagement with the US policy machine, rather than just with the
Pentagon”.
265.
Mr Straw
endorsed Mr Hoon’s proposals on 8 July.149
He advised Mr
Blair:
“We are all
agreed that we must act to remove the threat posed by Iraqi WMD.
If
the US
decide that to do so requires military action then the UK will want
to support
them. But
this will be harder for us to do without serious US action to
address some
of the
lacunae in their plan, notably:
•
no
strategic concept for the military plan and, in particular, no
thought
apparently
given to ‘day after’ scenarios. Although other parts of the
US
Administration
have done some work on such aspects, US military
planning
so far has
taken place in a vacuum.”
266.
Mr Straw
added: “Regional states in particular will want assurance that the
US has
thought
through the ‘day after’ questions before giving even tacit
support.”
“The key
point is how to get through to the Americans that the success of
any
military
operation against Iraq – and protection of our fundamental
interests in the
region –
depends on devising in advance a coherent strategy which assesses
the
political
and economic as well as military implications. They must also
understand
that we are
serious about our conditions for UK involvement.”
268.
The question
of whether a satisfactory plan for post-conflict Iraq should have
been
a condition
for UK involvement in military action is addressed later in this
Section and in
Section
6.5.
269.
Mr Hoon’s
proposal prompted Mr Nye to advise Mr Brown to write to the MOD
to
propose
that all options for UK participation in military operations
(including smaller and
148
Minute
Tebbit to Secretary of State [MOD], 3 July 2002,
‘Iraq’.
149
Letter
Straw to Prime Minister, 8 July 2002, ‘Iraq: Contingency
Planning’.
159