The Report of the Iraq Inquiry

the reposturing that attacks on it [Basra Palace] had been in the offing but were halted by

the ‘deal’.”

However, references to the process as a “deal” had been unhelpful and Maj Gen Shaw

told the Inquiry that:

“I should have packaged it better like the American Anbar uprising, which was broadly

the same thing.”151

Maj Gen Binns told that Inquiry that in his view:

“… the accommodation got us to the stage where the Iraqis took responsibility for the

security of Basra and they wouldn’t have done that if the violence had still been at an

unacceptable level.”152

He thought that:

“… back here in London there were people who were deeply uncomfortable with this

and the further you got away from Basra, the more uncomfortable people got with the

nature of the deal.”153

Although Maj Gen Binns was confident that Mr Browne was aware of and comfortable with

the risk associated with negotiations, he told the Inquiry:

“I think, you know, I think there were people in outer offices who wanted – not

unreasonably, they wanted to mitigate that risk.”154

Maj Gen Binns also told the Inquiry:

“…in retrospect, I said, ‘Well, look, we’ve done this before, surely, negotiated with

terrorists, surely somebody could give me some advice on negotiations’, and I didn’t

get any, so we were thinking on our feet about this process of negotiation. We were

just trying to come up with a policy.”

Mr Dowse told the Inquiry that the departure of UK troops from Basra City did affect the

quantity, quality and reliability of the information he was receiving.155

SIS3 told the Inquiry that the agreement reached had:

“… reserved the right for HMG to respond militarily to any individual or groups

planning attacks, that we would interdict any weaponry moving in, and, furthermore,

that we would reserve the right to intervene when the Iraqi Government requested us

to, if they did. So, in other words, we were circumscribing our military activity to some

extent, but I think with no risk to our overall posture.”156

He also considered that events in Basra had a wider effect across JAM:

“Muqtada al‑Sadr, who of course is the rather idiosyncratic, not to say incoherent

leader of JAM, sitting in Iran I think then made a virtue out of necessity by

151 Private hearing, 21 June 2010, page 22.

152 Private hearing, 2 June 2010, page 19.

153 Private hearing, 2 June 2010, page 21.

154 Private hearing, 2 June 2010, page 22.

155 Private hearing, 14 June 2010, pages 75-76.

156 Private hearing, 2010, page 62.

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