9.8 |
Conclusions: The post-conflict period
concerns
about the personal legal liabilities of UK staff working initially
in the Office
of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and then in the CPA, and
what their
deployment
might imply about the UK’s responsibility for decisions made by
those
organisations,
in the absence of formal consultation or the right of
veto.
42.
The
pre-invasion focus on a leading UN role in Iraq meant that little
thought had
been given
to the status of UK personnel during an occupation which followed
an
invasion
without Security Council authorisation. Better planning, including
proper
assessment
of a variety of different possible scenarios, would have allowed
such issues
to be
worked through at a much earlier stage.
43.
There was an
urgent need for suitably experienced UK officials ready to deploy
to
Baghdad,
but they had not been identified (see Section 15).
44.
No governance
arrangements were designed before the invasion which
might
have
enabled officials and Ministers based in London and Washington to
manage the
implications
of a joint occupation involving separate resources of a very
different scale.
Such
arrangements would have provided a means to identify and resolve
different
perspectives
on policy, and to facilitate joint decisions.
45.
Once the CPA
had been established, policy decisions were made largely
in
Baghdad,
where there was also no formal US/UK governance structure. This
created
a risk
described to the Inquiry by Sir Michael Wood, FCO Legal Adviser
from 2001 to
2006, as
“the UK being held jointly responsible for acts or omissions of the
CPA, without
a right to
consult and a right of joint decision”.10
46.
To manage that
risk, the UK proposed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
with
the US to
establish procedures for working together on issues related to the
Occupation,
but it
could not be agreed. Having supplied the overwhelming majority of
the CPA’s
resources,
the US had little incentive to give the UK an influential role in
deciding how
those
resources were to be used, and the UK lacked the will and leverage
to insist.
47.
In the absence
of formal arrangements, there was a clear risk that the UK
would
be
inadequately involved in important decisions, and the UK struggled
from the start
to have a
significant effect on the CPA’s policies. This was a source of
concern to both
Ministers
and officials in 2003, but the issue was never
resolved.
48.
Senior
individuals deployed to Iraq by the UK at this time saw themselves
either as
working for
the CPA in support of its objectives and as part of its chain of
command, or
as UK
representatives within the CPA with a remit to seek to influence
CPA decisions.
No-one
formally represented the UK position within the CPA decision-making
process,
a serious
weakness which should have been addressed at an early
stage.
10
Statement
Wood, 15 March 2011, page 22.
477