6.5 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to
March 2003
to that is
… contriving circumstances in which you have maximum legitimacy
and
therefore
maximum support …
“When you
have done all that … you need to identify the resources that
are
necessary
to carry that out.”589
1356.
Clear
warnings were given before the invasion of Iraq about the
potential
for
post‑conflict political disintegration and extremist violence, the
inadequacy
of US
post-conflict planning and the risk that, in the absence of UN
authorisation,
additional
international support would not be forthcoming.
1357.
Despite
those warnings, the Government failed to ensure that the
UK
was
adequately prepared for the range of circumstances it might
encounter in
southern
Iraq in the short, medium and long term.
1358.
The Inquiry
does not conclude that better planning and preparation
would
necessarily
have prevented the events that unfolded in Iraq between 2003
and
2009,
described in Sections 9 and 10, nor that it would have been
possible to
prepare for
every eventuality. Better plans and preparation, however, could
have
mitigated
some of the risks to which the UK and Iraq were exposed, and
increased
the
likelihood of achieving the outcomes desired by the UK and the
Iraqi people.
1359.
The lessons
identified by the Inquiry in relation to both the
planning
and
preparation for post-conflict operations and to post-conflict
operations
themselves
are set out in Section 10.4.
1360.
The
evidence described earlier in this Section shows that, although
there
were large
gaps in the information on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq available to the
UK
Government
before the invasion, much was known about the state of the
country
and the
possible impact of military action.
1361.
The
degraded state of Iraq’s infrastructure was recognised by UK
analysts
in January
2002 and was known to Mr Blair by the end of July
2002.
1362.
The most
comprehensive pre-invasion report on the state of Iraq’s
infrastructure
was the DIS
paper of mid-January 2002, seen by Mr Blair at the end of July
2002.590
With the
exception of road and rail transport, the situation described in
the paper was
comprehensively
bleak. The DIS assessed that Iraq’s theoretical power
generation
capacity
was about 10,000 megawatts (MW), but that the “practical limit” was
about
5,000 MW,
well below “even the most basic demand”.
589
Public
hearing, 1 December 2009, page 93.
590
Paper DIS,
18 January 2002, ‘Infrastructure Briefing Memorandum:
Iraq’.
551