6.5 | Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to March 2003

top priority for the British Government and various trade-offs had to be made and

someone had to make them on a day-to-day basis for the Prime Minister.”580

1346. Mr Chilcott warned against being “dazzled” by the IPU’s late creation: “a lot of

the work that the IPU was able to bring together in a more intense atmosphere had

been going on for some time”.581 But he did accept that the IPU could have been set

up sooner:

“… one of the lessons is obviously you can’t begin this sort of thinking too early,

and although we did begin serious thinking about the day after in the preceding

October … we could have created the IPU earlier. We could have had a greater

sense of the reality of what we were doing.”582

1347. A number of witnesses commented on the Government’s focus on

humanitarian preparations at the expense of other post-conflict issues.

1348. In his statement to the Inquiry, Mr Blair wrote:

“The over-riding concern was the humanitarian fall-out from conflict, together with

the potential damage, from firing oil wells to the environment and WMD attacks.”583

1349. Mr Straw told the Inquiry:

“… we had anticipated the problem of a humanitarian crisis sufficiently well that, on

the whole, we were able to avoid that, which was good. What we had not anticipated

was the extent of the inefficacy of ORHA …”584

1350. Lord Turnbull told the Inquiry that, although the UK prepared for the worst case on

the humanitarian front, it failed to anticipate the collapse of civil order: “The real problem

was security and we probably spent too much time on humanitarian … if we didn’t

establish security, nothing else counted for anything.”585

1351. Similarly, Lord Boyce stated:

“First of all, we recognised there could very well be a humanitarian problem … and

a lot of our focus was I think at the humanitarian level rather than the governance of

the country, in other words, picking up the point about law and order and so forth …

“I think that we probably took too narrow a view about what might be required in the

aftermath in terms of the governance aspects of life.”586

580 Public hearing, 8 December 2009, page 56.

581 Public hearing, 8 December 2009, pages 17-18.

582 Public hearing, 8 December 2009, pages 47-48.

583 Statement, 14 January 2011, page 13.

584 Public hearing, 8 February 2010, page 111.

585 Public hearing, 13 January 2010, page 39.

586 Public hearing, 27 January 2011, pages 67-68.

549