The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
development.
Activities included the establishment of a Basra Provincial
Development
Agency and
Development Fund.
“We have to
be realistic about what we can achieve. With the time and
resources
available,
we cannot address all Basra’s problems nor every falling in
its
public administration
and security forces. ‘Better Basra’ seeks to address
those
identified
as most critical to making progress against established
transition
readiness indicators.”
733.
Mr Rob
Tinline, Deputy Consul General in Basra from February 2007
to
February 2008
and one of the authors of BBP3, told the Inquiry:
“… one of
the great debates was: is it [BBP3] a British plan or is it a
coalition plan?
And
obviously with GOC MND(SE) saying, ‘Well, if it’s going to be mine,
it’s going
to have to
be a multi-national plan’, the Consul General saying, ‘Well, hang
on,
we can’t
clear this through the State Department, it will take forever’,
what do
you do?
I think I’m right in saying 90, 95 percent of the money that was
spent
in Basra
was American money. So if we wrote a British plan with five per
cent of
the money,
well …
“So how you
wrote a plan was actually a ridiculously complicated thing, and
we
ended up …
with a sort of compromise where we’d shown it to the Americans
and
they sort
of said, ‘Yes, this is more or less right’, but it was a British
plan … We
would never
have got a multi-national plan for the South through the
American
734.
A September
2008 review of the Basra PRT undertaken by the Stabilisation
Unit,
the
successor to the PCRU, offered a view on the Better Basra planning
process at
this time:
“There is
no [UK Government] wide strategy for Iraq … Although the Better
Basra
Plans did
go some way towards addressing this absence in 2006 and 2007,
these
evolved in
an incremental bottom-up way, hampered by a lack of strategic
guidance
from
Whitehall, and frequent change-over of personnel in theatre, and so
eventually
fell by the
wayside during the course of 2007.” 415
414
Public
hearing, 24 June 2010, page 27.
415
Report
Stabilisation Unit, 3 September 2008, ‘Review of the Basra
Provincial Reconstruction Team’.
314