Examination of Witnesses (Questions 920-939)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
JOHN REITH
CB CBE, MR IAN
LEE AND
REAR ADMIRAL
CHARLES STYLE
CBE
9 JULY 2003
Q920 Mr Roy: On another point, just
for clarification, the RAF engineers, are they trained in a wide
spectrum? I am just a layman here, are they trained in the wide
spectrum of engineering capability to help, post-conflict?
Lieutenant General Reith: I am
sorry, I am probably being a bit obtuse. We have different types
of engineers. Construction engineering sits within the Army. Within
the Air Force, obviously, we have specialist engineers who deal
with avionics and aircraft mechanics dealing with engines, and
so forth.
Q921 Mr Roy: Do any of those deal
with civil engineering, in the RAF?
Lieutenant General Reith: No,
it is purely to do with the equipment and the weapons and the
support for them. The construction work, and that sort of support,
maintenance of buildings, all sits either with the civilian contract,
because that is what we do normally in a steady state, or with
the Royal Engineers.
Q922 Mr Roy: Sorry, just to labour
this point again. In this type of conflict, would it not be advantageous,
for example, for RAF engineers to be given some sort of civil
engineering training, knowing that, in the world we live in now,
that could be where the skill is needed?
Lieutenant General Reith: My question
would be, why? We have the resources in defence; we are talking
about defence here. I am a Joint Commander. I take assets from
all three Services and put them to best effect. If you start spreading
and saying, "We need this civil engineering capability in
the Air Force and the Navy as well," actually you are increasing
cost. It is better to keep them concentrated training a specific
group which can be used to support any of the three Services for
any particular task.
Q923 Mr Howarth: Just a quick question
on the engineering side. You mentioned the railway engineers.
I gather that this is the first time really they have been in
action in earnest, perhaps since they built that railway up at
Khyber Pass; is that right?
Lieutenant General Reith: I think
that is unfair, because just after the Kosovo crisis we used them
to reopen the railway out of Macedonia into Kosovo.
Q924 Mr Howarth: Are they a big troop?
Lieutenant General Reith: Off
the top of my head, I cannot tell you the size, but they are very
effective. It is a specialist task and they are very good at it,
and there are a lot of reservists involved with them, obviously,
I think who work in our normal railway network.
Q925 Mr Hancock: General, I want
to ask some questions about what happened once the war started.
But, first of all, can I ask you if you were satisfied with the
intelligence which you had pre the war about the possibilities
you might face in Iraq?
Lieutenant General Reith: As always,
I thought that we had quite good intelligence, and, as I mentioned
earlier, of course, once you cross the line of departure, you
find it was not quite as accurate as you thought it would be.
Q926 Mr Hancock: Do you think we
knew our enemy well enough?
Lieutenant General Reith: Yes,
we knew his capabilities. What we did not know was what his tactics
were going to be.
Q927 Mr Hancock: If we had this intelligence
about the possibilities, the scenarios, we had the scenario that
everybody would rush out into the street and welcome us, and what
have you, did we have a scenario which suggested that there would
be widespread criminality and that looting would go on? Was there
a plan for that?
Lieutenant General Reith: From
my own experience, you can do nothing about looting, in the initial
stages.
Q928 Mr Hancock: That is a different
answer. The question is, did we have a plan, had anyone foreseen
the possibility of that happening, and did we have a plan to deal
with it?
Lieutenant General Reith: We were
planning a combat, we were not planning dealing with looting.
Q929 Mr Hancock: That is not the
question, General, is it? You said, did you not, that your staff
were involved in the planning both for the before stage and the
after stage, and I am asking, in all of the scenarios which you
had to experience, did we have a plan to deal with widespread
criminality and looting? Did we expect to have to safeguard hospitals
from having their equipment stolen?
Lieutenant General Reith: No.
We did not have a plan to stop hospitals having their equipment
stolen, because we did not expect it. If I can put it in perspective,
we did not find out until afterwards that, in fact, the Shia population
had not been allowed to use the hospitals. It is rather like what
happened in Albania, when they virtually destroyed their country.
This was a reaction against the regime, and the target for the
looting was anything that the regime had run, and we did not expect
that.
Q930 Mr Hancock: As a top-level Commander,
do you think the intelligence you had was either negligent or
defective?
Lieutenant General Reith: Intelligence
draws on whatever sources it can draw on and tries to make, shall
we say, a sensible assessment from the information it has got.
I do not think anybody could have anticipated what was going to
be a reaction within the population.
Q931 Mr Hancock: General, I was told
yesterday the Americans had people in the middle of Baghdad who
were on a communication link to the White House, supposedly being
able to pinpoint where Saddam was, and that was before the war
started, these were American service personnel they claim to have
had in these positions. I am a little surprised that there was
no intelligence available to both you and the American forces
that there was the possibility that these things would happen
because of the way in which these people had been treated by this
regime. Rather than welcome us, they would take it out on any
aspect of the regime which was available to them. Do you not think
that was a failure somewhere along the line, not to have grasped
that?
Lieutenant General Reith: As I
say, I do not think that anybody could have foreseen what happened.
Q932 Mr Hancock: There is not a single
word about it in here, not a single word. You do not recognise
it as a failure of the intelligence community not to have told
you that this was a possibility. I cannot understand how you could
have produced this report in the MoD of your First Reflections.
What is the most horrific reflection which people have had since
this war started has been the way in which the country was looting
itself, and the criminal elements took over that country for the
space of a week nearly?
Lieutenant General Reith: I am
not sure really that the people themselves would have known before
the conflict that they were going to indulge in looting afterwards,
and if that is not known then obviously we cannot have known it
through intelligence. I think also it is fair to say that, although
there has been looting in the UK area of operations, it was fairly
short-lived; although no doubt there is still some isolated looting,
it has come under control.
Q933 Mr Hancock: Widespread looting
in Baghdad as well?
Lieutenant General Reith: There
was thought of some degree given to the possibility of lawlessness
before the campaign started, but there comes a point where you
cannot have a plan which addresses a scale of problem which is
unforeseen.
Syd Rapson: A lot of the experience though,
with very intrusive television which took us into the streets
of Baghdad, or Basra, immediately after the fighting stopped,
we need to plan that in for any future operation. Is that being
done actively, where we did not anticipate it, or we assumed the
Iraqi military would take over on our behalf, that we need to
plan that in?
Q934 Mr Hancock: You saw this in
Kosovo though, you saw it in Bosnia?
Lieutenant General Reith: We did
not see it in Bosnia.
Q935 Mr Hancock: Come on.
Lieutenant General Reith: No,
not in the same way at all.
Q936 Mr Hancock: You saw it where
one side got into the other side's properties. They had nowhere
to live and, rather than move in, they blew them up, and they
did the same thing in Kosovo. If that was not a lesson that people
who had nothing actually do not want what the other person has
got, they just want to deny those people what they never had?
Lieutenant General Reith: I do
not think the Balkan analogy is the correct one here, because
the blowing up of houses in the Balkans was to stop people returning
to their homes in areas where they had polarised, in terms of
the community.
Q937 Mr Hancock: Looting?
Lieutenant General Reith: The
looting I think we need to put in perspective here. It was very
short-lived, in Basra. Basra has a population of nearly two million
people. It is like trying to control with three battalions something
which is a third the size of London, and we just did not have
the resources, and the UK could never have had the resources to
have stopped that. Where we saw it, we stopped it. Clearly, press
were in areas where we were not, and so you were seeing it happen
before your eyes on television, but the people on the ground were
responsible and tried to stop it, and we did stop it. Once we
were no longer fighting and we were able to get more control in
the streets then, of course, it went down dramatically, very,
very quickly indeed. I would say also that looting might not be
the exact, right term, because in many ways what was happening
there was what the population there would have seen as a fair
redistribution of wealth.
Q938 Mr Hancock: Taking an operating
table out of a hospital?
Lieutenant General Reith: We had
a group there who had been victimised over many years, and it
is rather like looking across a fence and seeing somebody with
everything and you are living in poverty, and, clearly, if they
get an opportunity, they will take. I think that was what happened
here, it was a redistribution.
Q939 Mr Hancock: Maybe this question
should be directed more at the MoD. Surely there must have been
some lessons. We failed to grasp the psyche of Milosovic. One
of the lessons of Kosovo was surely that we must know our enemy
better and we must understand the population's view about various
scenarios which will occur. If we learned anything from that campaign
it was that we did not have sufficient knowledge about what was
happening, or possibly was going to happen, on the ground, within
the civilian population, their resilience to bombing, the fact
that they did not come out on the streets, etc. Surely the MoD
had a responsibility to put in place either the right sort of
intelligence or the right sort of feedback to the field commanders
on how to deal with this. The issue of when the British police
were involved, between Phases Three and Four, if that process
could have been speeded up, once we were aware of what was happening,
that there was not overwhelming rejoicing in the streets, actually
there were significant law and order problems to deal with, this
is more, I think, General, a point for them to deal with?
Lieutenant General Reith: No,
I do not think so. I will deal with that.
| 
