6.5 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to
March 2003
272.
A briefing
note prepared for staff in the UK National Contingent
Headquarters
(NCHQ) in
Qatar referred to a revised version of the Common Document
dated
11 February
that has not been seen by the Inquiry.134
273.
The Inquiry
has seen no evidence that the IPU updated the Common
Document
during
preparations for the US inter-agency Rock Drill on post-conflict
issues on 21 and
22
February.
274.
The Rock Drill
is addressed in detail later in this Section.
275.
On 20
February, Mr Chilcott updated Mr Straw on the first nine
days of the IPU.
It had “a
core staff (from FCO, MOD and DFID), a large room, and IT”. The
Unit was
working
well with other departments and UK military planners and had
“successfully
contracted
out a lot of work”.135
276.
Mr Chilcott
told Mr Straw that ORHA was emerging as the IPU’s key
counterpart
in the US
and that Maj Gen Cross and the IPU were “two sides of the same coin
and
[would]
work increasingly hand in glove”.
277.
Mr Chilcott
told the Inquiry that, although numbers were small (“maybe
only
six, eight,
ten, for the first couple of weeks”), the IPU drew on expertise
elsewhere in
Whitehall
that allowed it to pull together a strategic view.136
While
military planners and
PJHQ were
planning what would be needed as troops occupied territory and
became
“responsible
… for the administration of where they were”, the IPU was “thinking
about
the
political process and the big issues about the development fund for
Iraq or oil policy
or what to
do about war criminals or the importance of legitimacy and legal
questions”.
278.
Asked how
influential the IPU had been, Mr Chilcott stated:
“… I don’t
think our main issue was having to convince other parts of
the
government
machinery that they should be doing things that they didn’t want to
do.
“I think we
were really synthesising the views and expertise across
government.
“Where we
needed to have clout … was in influencing the United States, and I
think,
there, we …
had no more clout than a sort of body of middle to senior ranking
British
officials
would have had with their American counterparts.”137
279.
On the
relationship with ORHA, Mr Chilcott said that: “ORHA in some
ways weren’t
really our
counterparts because they were the sort of operational implementers
…
as well as
the drawers up of the plan, whereas we … were writing policy papers
and
briefing
and lines to take.”138
134
Paper SO2
[NCHQ], 13 February 2003, ‘Introductory Note to Folder on Phase IV
Planning’.
135
Minute
Chilcott to Private Secretary [FCO], 20 February 2003, ‘Iraq:
Day-After (Phase IV)’.
136
Public
hearing, 8 December 2009, pages 7-8.
137
Public
hearing, 8 December 2009, pages 8-9.
138
Public
hearing, 8 December 2009, page 20.
359