6.5 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to
March 2003
1321.
Asked at what
stage the UK would have needed to exert its influence
in
Washington
for post-conflict planning to have been more effective, Sir
Christopher Meyer
told the
Inquiry: “if the Americans had their act together in
September/October [2002],
and we did
likewise, then you could have done it”.560
1322.
Mr Chaplin
stated that Ministers “constantly stressed to their American
opposite
numbers the
need for proper aftermath planning”, but the US was “obviously
going to
be the
greater partner of this enterprise and we were going to be the
junior partner”.561
“The
message … we constantly got from the American side, particularly
those that
were
frustrated with the lack of planning, as they saw it, was, ‘Please,
could we
make this
clearer at a higher level in the US administration?’ Colin Powell
didn’t
need to be
convinced, but President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
did.”
1324.
Mr Chaplin
explained that the UK response had been “to keep feeding in
the
ideas of
what we thought was the sensible way ahead on the issues” and to
provide
“people to
sit alongside the US opposite numbers, in particular, General Tim
Cross”.
1325.
In his
statement to the Inquiry, Maj Gen Cross suggested that UK efforts
to exert
influence
on US thinking achieved little: “I got no sense of UK pressure on
the US; no
‘demands’
for clarity over the intended ‘End State’ or the planning to
achieve it.”562
1326.
Maj Gen Cross
provided an example of his own difficulties in influencing
US
thinking
during his time in Washington in February and March
2003.563
At a lunch
with
Secretary
Rumsfeld and others, he had challenged the assumption that the
overthrow of
Saddam
Hussein would be greeted with such relief in Iraq that the US would
be able to
move on
quickly:
“I argued
that this was, perhaps, fine as a Plan ‘A’ – but what was
desperately
needed was
a Plan ‘B’ and a Plan ‘C’, and a recognition that what would
probably
emerge
would be an amalgam of the last two. It was made clear that my
views were
not
welcomed.”
1327.
Mr Chilcott
told the Inquiry: “we could have any number of variations of our
own
plan, but
what mattered was influencing the American plan, and that was where
our
main effort
was concentrated”.564
1328.
FCO
witnesses spoke of the difficulty of working for a negotiated
settlement
while
preparing for conflict.
560
Public
hearing, 26 November 2009, page 96.
561
Public
hearing, 1 December 2009, pages 58-59.
562
Statement,
2009, page 10.
563
Statement,
2009, page 14.
564
Public
hearing, 8 December 2009, page 19.
545