6.5 |
Planning and preparation for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, January to
March 2003
1457.
Where
policy recommendations were supported by untested
assumptions,
those
assumptions were seldom challenged. When they were, the issue was
not
always
followed through.
1458.
It was the
responsibility of officials to identify, analyse and advise on
risk
and
Ministers’ responsibility to ensure that measures to mitigate
identifiable
risks,
including a range of policy options, had been considered before
significant
decisions
were taken on the direction of UK policy.
1459.
Occasions
when that would have been appropriate included:
•
after
Mr Blair’s meeting with Mr Hoon, Mr Straw and others
on 23 July
2002;
•
after the
adoption of resolution 1441;
•
before or
immediately after the decision to deploy troops in January
2003;
•
after the
Rock Drill in February 2003; and
•
after
Mr Blair’s meeting on post-conflict issues on 6 March
2003.
1460.
There is no
indication of formal risk analysis or formal consideration
of
options
associated with any of those events.
1461.
In his
statement to the Inquiry, Mr Blair said:
“… with
hindsight, we now see that the military campaign to defeat
Saddam
was
relatively easy; it was the aftermath that was hard. At the time,
of course,
we could
not know that and a prime focus throughout was the
military
1462.
The
conclusions reached by Mr Blair after the invasion did not
require the
benefit of
hindsight.
1463.
Mr Blair’s
long-standing conviction that successful international
intervention
required long-term commitment had been clearly expressed in
his
Chicago
speech in 1999.
1464.
That
conviction was echoed, in the context of Iraq, in frequent advice
to
Mr Blair
from Ministers and officials.
1465.
Between
early 2002 and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Mr Blair
received
warnings
about:
•
the
significance of the post-conflict phase as the “strategically
decisive”
phase of
the engagement in Iraq (in the SPG paper of 13 December
2002652)
651
Statement,
14 January 2011, page 14.
652
Paper
[SPG], 13 December 2002, ‘UK Military Strategic Thinking on
Iraq’.
565