10.4 |
Conclusions: Reconstruction
•
Was the UK
delivering a short‑term return which would boost the political
process?
Those were
important questions. It should not have taken until May 2005 for
officials to
pose them,
or for Ministers to require advice on them.
DOP(I) did
not address those questions.
Work by
officials to establish the funding available for reconstruction
across Government
was fed
into discussions on the UK’s deployment to Helmand province,
Afghanistan.
109.
DFID’s intent
in March 2003 was to deliver a development programme in
Iraq
which
fitted their standard model for Middle‑Income Countries. The
programme would
focus on
providing technical assistance for the economic and institutional
reforms which
would
underpin the reconstruction process and, given Iraq’s potential
wealth, would be
relatively
short term. The majority of assistance would be delivered through
multilateral
channels.
110.
That approach
was not tailored to the known scale and nature of the
post‑conflict
reconstruction
task in Iraq. The information available to the Government before
the
invasion
clearly set out the deteriorated state of Iraq’s infrastructure. Ms
Short told the
House of
Commons at the end of January 2003 that Iraq’s infrastructure was
“in chronic
disrepair.
Hospitals, clinics, sanitation facilities and water treatment
plants suffer
from a
terrible lack of maintenance. The result is that the Iraqi people’s
lives are
111.
By May 2003,
DFID had begun to change its approach.
112.
There were two
major shifts in DFID’s focus in Iraq over the period covered by
the
Inquiry, in
response to broader UK objectives and the situation on the ground.
The speed
and scale
of DFID’s response were informed by its own departmental
priorities.
113.
Those shifts
were the product of series of individual judgments and
decisions
by DFID
Ministers and officials, rather than of a structured
strategy‑making process.
That
incremental approach was facilitated by the weaknesses in the
Government’s
strategy‑making
process (described in Section 9.8).
114.
First, from
June 2003, DFID moved to support programmes in the South
that
would have
an immediate and visible impact. That shift was driven by the
Government’s
concern
over the declining level of consent for the UK military presence in
the South
due, in the
Government’s view, to CPA(South)’s inability to deliver
reconstruction.
115.
DFID produced
an Interim Country Assistance Plan for Iraq in February
2004,
setting out
how it planned to contribute to Iraq’s reconstruction and
development. The
Plan stated
that, given the rapidly changing situation in Iraq, it would need a
substantial
review
after one year.
36
House of
Commons, Official
Report, 30
January 2003, columns 1053‑1054.
545