The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
been
“approved” by the Ba’ath Party which might mean they were
considered to be
“tainted”.
21.
In his memoir,
Mr Douglas Feith, US Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy,
describes
re‑writing the first draft of Gen Franks’ message produced by
CENTCOM.13
Mr Feith’s
re‑written version included the reference to the disestablishment
of the Ba’ath
Party. His
view was that disestablishing the Ba’ath Party was a separate issue
from the
fate of
individual members, which was still under discussion at the time of
Gen Franks’
statement.
22.
In a paper for
the Pentagon Public Affairs Office on 16 April, Mr Feith’s
Office
suggested
that the answer to questions about what would happen to members of
the
Ba’ath
Party should be:
“… its [the
Ba’ath Party’s] property and records will be considered by the CPA
as the
property of
the Iraqi people. Absent exceptional circumstances, top‑tier
members
of the
Ba’ath Party will not be eligible to hold any positions of
responsibility under
the CPA.
Lower ranking members of the Ba’ath Party will not necessarily be
barred
from such
employment. No one will be punished merely for membership in
the
Ba’ath
Party.”
23.
Gen Franks’
Freedom Message was issued on 16 April.14
It
said:
“The Arab
Socialist Renaissance Party of Iraq (Hiz al‑Ba’ath al‑Arabi
al‑Istiraki
al‑Iraqi)
is hereby disestablished. Property of the Ba’ath Party should be
turned
over to the
Coalition Provisional Authority. The records of the Ba’ath Party
are an
important
part of the records of the Government of Iraq and should be
preserved …
and
turn[ed] … over to the Coalition Provisional
Authority.”
24.
On 17 April, a
discussion between Sir David Manning, Mr Blair’s Foreign
Policy
Adviser,
and Dr Condoleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor,
suggested that the
announcement
about the Ba’ath Party had come as a surprise to
her.15
25.
Mr Straw
told the Inquiry that he had discussed the question of
de‑Ba’athification
with
Gen Franks in Kuwait in mid‑April:
“… and he
had said to me that his view was you should take anybody apart
from
those who
were obviously bad into the system, and then vet them
subsequently,
and if they
– and I remember him saying – if they didn’t pass muster, didn’t
pass
the
vetting, then you’d kick them out. But what you didn’t do was
wholly to degrade
the
administration in advance, and I thought, not least because he was
the senior
13
Feith
DJ. War and
Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on
Terrorism.
HarperCollins, 2008.
14
Statement
General Tommy Franks, 16 April 2003, ‘Freedom Message to the Iraqi
People’.
15
Letter
Manning to McDonald, 17 April 2003, ‘Iraq: Conversation with Condi
Rice’.
6