Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1778-1779)
17 DECEMBER 2003
MR EDWARD
CHAPLIN OBE, MS
CAROLYN MILLER,
AIR VICE
MARSHAL CLIVE
LOADER OBE AND
MR IAN
LEE
Q1778 Chairman: Thank you very much for
coming. First the good news, then the bad news. I have made a
big mistake in combining two very important evidence sessions
into one afternoon. We cannot do justice to the importance of
the subject that we have invited you in to speak on, therefore
we are trying to get as much done as we can up until a quarter
to six and then, I hope you do not mind, but sometime in late
January or early February we will invite you back. I am really
sorry about that. I accept responsibility. How was responsibility
divided between the different government departments involved
in planning to minimise the humanitarian consequences of the conflict
and in planning for the wider needs of a post-conflict Iraq? Linked
to that, what were the responsibilities of each of your departments?
Mr Lee: I think we all need to
say something on this subject. From the Ministry of Defence point
of view, I should say obviously our responsibility is the military
planning and the question here is how broadly we interpret that.
From our point of view we tried to interpret it on a very broad
basis in the sense that we are engaged in a complete broad campaign,
as has been said in other sessions, not specifically a military
campaign in the classic sense of trying to remove an enemy from
territory, a much broader based political campaign with a military
component in it. From that point of view, we were conscious that
we needed to look at the planning of the campaign over its entire
evolution. Possibly the whole thing might have been successful
on a purely coercive basis, no fighting actually necessary, on
the other hand fighting may have been necessary and in fact it
was. So we were always conscious that our planning had to cover
what came to be called Phase 4 in American terminology, but it
had to cover the period after a conflict had finished. We were
always conscious that whatever happened, whatever course of action
we went down, assuming there was conflict, there was going to
be a post-conflict phase in which military forces would have some
role to play and therefore we had to think about what that role
was and how that role would relate to the efforts of other government
departments. That would be the responsibility that we had, to
plan along that spectrum. Perhaps at that point I should hand
over to my colleagues to say how they fit in around that.
Mr Chaplin: I shall leave DFID
to answer the specific point about humanitarian issues. In the
Foreign Office we were thinking at quite an early stage about
the "what-ifs", if it came to military action what sort
of situation we would be faced with and in particular what sort
of political process would be necessary, what were the things
we needed to think about. So a certain amount of work was going
on on that which was shared across Whitehall through the normal
Cabinet Office mechanisms. At a later stage, in February 2003,
it was decided that what we needed was to set up a unit which
was based in the Foreign Office, the Iraq planning unit, which
addressed, in a more detailed way, all the issues from humanitarian
through to other post-conflict issues, political process and so
on. That unit started quite small and grew pretty rapidly, including
from the start representatives from the Ministry of Defence and
DFID.
Q1779 Chairman: How many meetings did
you hold?
Mr Chaplin: Do you mean before
February?
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