Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1800-1819)
17 DECEMBER 2003
MR EDWARD
CHAPLIN OBE, MS
CAROLYN MILLER,
AIR VICE
MARSHAL CLIVE
LOADER OBE AND
MR IAN
LEE
Q1800 Mr Blunt: Was there not a planned
date?
Mr Lee: We were going through
a process, which was trying to balance the need to back up the
diplomatic track with preparation of military force. There was
a judgment to be made as to whether it would actually destabilise
the preferred diplomatic course if it appeared that one was making
too many military preparations and that the truth of it was that
we were on an unavoidable course to war. If that had been the
perception, then that would have destabilised the diplomatic track
which during the whole of the autumn and most of the first couple
of months of the year, was very much the preferred track. I would
not describe that as a constraint exactly; it was simply that
a balanced judgment was having to be made about that factor.
Q1801 Mr Blunt: Viewed from outside this
looked like an unavoidable course to war; it certainly would appear
to have been so on the part of our American partners. What I am
seeking to get at is what constraints were on you in terms of
planning what was an unavoidable course to war as understood by
everybody taking part in the planning process, including those
people who made clear to me in the summer of 2002, when we became
involved in the planning process, that that was where we were
going to end up, that we were going to have to end up some time
in the spring of 2003, given the military constraints on weather
and the rest? What constraints then operated on you, planning
an inevitable conflict, whilst having to sustain the fiction that
there was a diplomatic course which had to run its course?
Mr Lee: I can only repeat that
we would not accept the premise of that question: that there was
an inevitable course.
Q1802 Mr Blunt: Let me rephrase it: to
sustain the premise that the diplomatic course might have some
merit.
Mr Lee: There was a process of
military preparation going on which was meant to provide coercive
backing for the diplomatic process, but also be realistic and
credible, so that if the diplomatic process were to fail in the
end, then one could resort to the military process, which was
in fact what we did. That was the balance which was being struck
throughout the period, in fact right up to the weekend when it
was decided that the second resolution was not going to be agreed.
All the way through that period, there was still some hope that
the whole thing could be resolved without resort to the use of
force. That was the situation. We were not constrained in the
planning. Obviously, progressively, as one goes through that period,
more and more of the planning becomes actual in the sense of the
urgent operational requirements, extra equipment actually being
fitted to tanks, aircraft and so on and in the sense of troops
actually being deployed forward. It was still the case until the
last moment that there was a possibility that use of force could
be avoided.
Q1803 Rachel Squire: May I focus my questions
on DFID and the Foreign Office and particularly the influence
you may or may not have had in the decision-making process and
the actual conduct of possible combat operations? May I ask both
yourself, Ms Miller, and Mr Chaplin, whether you fed into plans
for the combat phase in terms of targeting, for example?
Mr Chaplin: There was a sense
in which, when thinking about the post-conflict phase, if military
action was going to have to be taken and thinking about the situation
you would then be faced with, the judgments made then certainly
did feed back into the targeting.
Mr Lee: It might be best if Air
Vice Marshal Loader speaks about targeting and the issue you are
trying to get at will come out.
Q1804 Rachel Squire: Yes; please. I am
interested in your view of whether these two departments influenced
what the military were allowed to do.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I suspect
I shall disappoint you by saying this was a very joined-up process.
We had the opportunity, which was espoused by PUS earlier on,
that the type of weapons which had become available between the
first Gulf War and Op Telic meant that we could undertake a far
more precise air campaign and although it is certainly true to
say that it was actually decided a great many potential targets
in the target sense which could have been attacked and would have
been legal and would have legality based on military value, would
not be attacked because of this very blending of intent, which
was so critical, to leave Iraq in its best possible shape for
the aftermath with the humanitarian aspects, the requirements
for other essential services and infrastructure and so on. It
was very much at the forefront of our thinking that it was very
much an effects-based campaign and those effects were not just
predicated upon the military effect required in Phase 3, the war-fighting,
but also the situation in which we wished to find ourselves in
Phase 4, the aftermath. May I just quickly say that we had in
our thinking right from the beginning, when we knew at a late
stage that we were going to go on the southern option, that the
first time the marines set foot on the al-Faw peninsula, when
they went a kilometre north, the kilometre behind them would be
Phase 4, therefore, for example, the embedding of DFID representatives,
not only in the plethora of meetings already alluded to which
happened in London but in divisional headquarters. At that level
we recognised the imperative of getting things right at the earliest
possible planning stage.
Ms Miller: Targeting was one of
many issues which we discussed with the military through our civil
military adviser from very early on, through our embedded people
and through our continuing work. There was a range of issues on
which we worked jointly and that was just one.
Q1805 Rachel Squire: Would you like to
make any comment on whether there were occasions on which the
humanitarian concerns were outweighed by other military objectives,
in spite of all the points which have been made either by the
Foreign Office or DFID or another department? Were there times
when the military objectives took priority over humanitarian concerns?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: It would
be wrong to pretend: we were not in the business of potentially
losing this campaign, so provided things were legal, they would
happen. Actually that is intent. I am not aware of a single occasion
where there was any such conflict between the requirements of
the military campaign and the winning concept and what we wanted
to do and the state we wanted to leave things in and so on with
regard to the aftermath. I am not aware of any time when I saw
that potential conflict come to any real head.
Q1806 Chairman: If it had, would this
have been fed up to another committee because yours was not the
committee to determine targeting policy? Had there been objections
to a mosque or shopping centre of whatever, would you then have
had the responsibility of challenging?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I am
sure they would have been dealt with in the DCMO structure and
processes which were described by PUS earlier on. They certainly
would not have been dealt with by the military alone. I am sure
some sort of accommodation would have been made. Nonetheless,
it is fair to say as a military man that there was one thing which
had to happen, which was to have the winning military concept.
To a certain extent other things are subordinated to that. Actually
it never came to any direct choices which were so stark and would
have created a difficult schism.
Q1807 Rachel Squire: May I come back
to the Foreign Office and DFID and ask you what your role was
or what the role of your staff was in PJHQ and in theatre before
and during the campaign?
Mr Chaplin: We did not have a
representative in PJHQ but we had MOD embedded in the Iraq planning
unit which I have described as set up from February onwards. Thereafter
we had someone on the ground in Basra working as a civil liaison
officer alongside the general in charge of operations there. The
co-ordination machinery which has been described, chiefs of staff
as well as the Iraq planning unit and the Cabinet Office machinery,
continued to operate before and during the conflict.
Q1808 Rachel Squire: Did you ever have
someone at Northwood?
Mr Chaplin: No-one from the Foreign
Office, no.
Ms Miller: We attended a lot of
meetings at PJHQ, but we did not have someone permanently there.
We had two seconded military advisers out in theatre pre-conflict
and those two people continued afterwards and one extra was sent
out to work specifically only with the military.
Q1809 Rachel Squire: Was either department
ever represented at US central command? Did you ever have staff
there?
Mr Chaplin: No; the Foreign Office
certainly did not.
Ms Miller: No, we seconded to
ORHA and the CPA but not central command.
Q1810 Rachel Squire: With the benefit
of hindsight, do you think it would have been useful for either
department to have had more staff out in theatre or in the domestic
military headquarters?
Mr Chaplin: The whole question
of civil liaison, in other words people to work alongside the
military who have some knowledge of the country, perhaps the language
and so on, is one of the things which were revisited in the Whitehall
process of learning lessons from this exercise. We have had difficulty
in continuity of providing people for long enough. We have provided
them, but ideally we would probably be better prepared next time
to have those people alongside military commanders in theatre.
Ms Miller: We did deploy and second
people quite quickly. It is difficult for me to judge whether
more people would have been useful. Too many people could get
in the way. I should be interested in a military view on this.
Mr Lee: There is a question of
levels here and at what level you co-ordinate the different interests.
We tend to co-ordinate between the departments of state and Foreign
Office at the Whitehall level by participation in the Foreign
Office and the chiefs of staff, for example, and the Cabinet Office
machinery. Then, at the military headquarters, PJHQ in our case
or CentCom in the American case, it is basically a military organisation.
If one tried to co-ordinate both at the Whitehall level and also
have co-ordination at all the other levels down the command chain,
you would find yourself with a rather complicated system to manage.
Edward is rightly referring, right at the bottom as it were, to
the question of Foreign Office people for their local knowledge
in the country where you are eventually, which is a slightly different
issue. In co-ordinating planning we have tended to restrict that
more or less in departments at the Whitehall level, with the exception
that DFID advisers do join down the command chain as well because
they have a more operational role than the Foreign Office does.
Q1811 Mr Cran: There have been fairly
persistent rumours that there was a lot of wrangling between the
US State Department and the US Department of Defense over plans
for post-conflict Iraq. Whether you can speak to that or not I
do not know. How did this impact on the plans we were developing
and how did we co-ordinate our plans with those of our American
allies?
Mr Chaplin: We did a lot of talking
to the Americans, both through the Embassy in Washington and through
visits in both directions from quite an early stage, from third
quarter of 2002 onwards. The State Department had already done
a lot of work and a future of Iraq project where they had produced
a lot of quite detailed plans about what should happen in the
civilian sector if there were a change of regime and military
occupation and so on. We plugged into that and we fed in thoughts,
questions and so on. It is no secret that the process of the US
administration consulting each other in Washington is less joined
up than the one we enjoy here. In the end this was a DOD plan
for the aftermath. What we discovered was the best way of influencing
this process was to get people seconded into the US machinery.
This is why we put a high priority on sending people both from
FCO and DFID and indeed from the MOD to be in ORHA, which was
the first organisation set up under Jay Garner, which went out
to Kuwait and then into Iraq. Our involvement increased from there
up to and including putting people into the CPA.
Q1812 Mr Cran: That is the mechanistic
answer which you obviously have to give. What I am really trying
to seek from you is how influential you think we were in influencing
the decisions which were taken.
Mr Chaplin: We did have some influence.
Sometimes influence is exerted by asking the question. You then
stimulate some debate within the US administration around a question
they had perhaps not thought of, or had not thought of in that
way, or had not thought about it being relevant to something else
they attached importance to. Our advice was always welcome. It
is difficult to judge in the end whether a decision which was
taken owed more or less to our particular inspiration or advice
at the beginning of the process. It was a constant toing and froing.
Q1813 Mr Cran: Did US activities during
Phases 3 and 4 take the form that you expected out of the discussions
you were telling us about?
Mr Chaplin: Yes. ORHA was really
designed, as far as we could see, to prepare mainly for humanitarian
issues. It did not have a great focus in the early stages on the
other issues which needed to be addressed. Although actually the
first political process meeting I attended on behalf of the government,
which was in Nasiriyah on 15 April, was attended by Jay Garner
so he had an overall role, my impression was that the focus of
ORHA, the way it was staffed up, was largely to address the expected
humanitarian problems.
Ms Miller: This is one of the
areas we were in dialogue about, trying to stress the need, that
a move from humanitarian to post-conflict reconstruction has to
be executed very smoothly. This is one of the areas we did try
to push and seconded people in those areas to try to help move
that forward.
Q1814 Mr Cran: My final question is simply
this. How much freedom of action did we expect and eventually
have in our own area, Basra and so on? I just ask that question
against the background that when we ourselves went to Iraq, we
were quite astonished to find that the Brits in Basra would have
liked to have opened or arranged for the opening of the international
airport but could not do so because approval had not been given
from Baghdad. How much freedom of action do we really have in
our own sector?
Mr Lee: That is a difficult one
for me to answer. We probably have quite a lot of freedom of action
until you bump up against those areas where the decision you are
attempting to take has national consequences. The decision about
opening Basra airport might be seen to have a consequence for
what happens in other airports in Iraq and there is an overall
situation here that the CPA is trying to lead policy now, in conjunction
with the Iraqi Governing Council, for the whole of Iraq. Any decisions
which have the effect of dividing the country up prematurely,
or at all in fact, into different almost sub-states, might be
viewed as being a not entirely desirable thing to do. From a UK
point of view, as we said earlier on, one of our objectives is
to maintain the entire territorial integrity of Iraq. As long
as you are not trying to do things which interfere with some of
the broader principles, we probably have a lot of freedom of action.
There are certain issues where you do stumble across that and
then of course there are financial issues, where the larger amounts
of money at the moment are under the control centrally of the
CPA and therefore there is a constraint in that dimension.
Q1815 Mr Cran: We do not have time to
pursue this and I know that, but I for one would really like to
see a piece of paper telling us from you, or whoever is responsible,
telling us just what things we can do without reference to the
authority in Baghdad. I repeat what I said. I formed the view
after that visit that it was fairly constrained, that is we were
fairly constrained in what we could do. Could you put this down
on a piece of paper?
Mr Lee: I am sure we could do
something. It would have to be a cross-government piece. We can
be constrained by a number of things: finance is one, policy is
another, the rules under which at the moment we are occupying
powers do constrain what you can do within a country you are occupying.
There are bound to be a number of constraints. In the specific
case of Basra airport, there are also issues to do with liability.
If one opens the airport and cannot absolutely guarantee the security
there, then there are issues as to what liability the government
would be taking on for operating that airport. It may be seen
in theatre that it would be a jolly good thing to open the airport,
but there are maybe larger issues at play there.[3]
Mr Cran: We live in the days of joined-up
government, so it must be easy to produce a paper. I should love
to see it.
Chairman: If I recall correctly, the
Dane who was head of that area actually used his credit card to
pay for security at his headquarters, because in the CPA they
had not chosen the security company. He went to a Danish national
company, Group 4, who were very effective, until the cavalry arrived
in the form of a security company that the Americans had chosen.
There were tensions and as the situation at that stage and now
looked less threatening in our part of Iraq, there appeared to
be differential standards operating. In our area we were constrained
from exploiting the situation because of the slowness in the CPA
in Baghdad making decisions. That is what generated our concern.
Q1816 Mr Viggers: Early in 2003 we had
a cross-departmental committee sitting fairly frequently to consider
the situation in Iraq. What assumptions were made before the conflict
about internal stability and security after the conflict?
Mr Chaplin: Just to clarify one
thing, this was not a committee; it was actually a unit of officials.
They were there every day and working to me, whereas elsewhere
in Whitehall you had meetings of different government departments.
Ian can probably say something about what assumptions the military
were making. There was an assumption that there might be a very
large humanitarian problem, so a lot of emphasis was put on that
and that happily turned out not to be right, partly by the skill
of doing things like seizing the oil fields early, partly by the
swiftness of the campaign, so there were no huge flows of refugees.
In terms of stability after the conflict, as has already been
mentioned, we made an assumption which turned out to be an underestimate,
about the extent to which you would still have Iraqi administrative
structures to deal with, both in the civil service and in the
police. We perhaps also underestimated the extent to which the
total dysfunctionality of Iraqi society after years of suffering
under Saddam Hussein meant that the looting problem turned out
to be a larger problem, going on for longer than we had perhaps
assumed. Those are a couple of examples.
Mr Lee: I would agree; those are
the main issues. With hindsight, we did a lot of our thinking
about what might happen post conflict influenced by the fear that
there might be humanitarian or environmental disasters of various
sorts, refugee flows, shortage of food, collapse of the UN Oil
for Food programme's distribution systems and those kinds
of issues. We had made assumptions and included remedies in the
planning so far as we could for those situations; emergency ration
packs and so on. Fortunately many of those scenarios did not come
to pass and the looting has already been mentioned. I would just
add one specific point about the planning, the difficulty of dealing
with the looting question is that in a situation where the military
forces were there on the ground still to some extent having to
deal with low level war-fighting, it was difficult for them at
the same time to be in an anti-looter mode and to divide themselves
between those two tasks. The scale of the looting which took place
for quite a short and intense period was a difficulty, given that
Basra, in our case, is quite a large city and obviously we had
limited numbers of people there. That was an issue.
Q1817 Mr Viggers: DFID is quoted on 21
March before the battle for Basra as saying "the need for
the maintenance of law and order has been fully appreciated and
incorporated into campaign planning". It was a pretty breathtaking
miscalculation, was it not?
Ms Miller: It was certainly something
we discussed and we had flagged up. It was just the absolute extent
to which it broke down that perhaps we had not quite anticipated.
Q1818 Mr Viggers: Just to rephrase the
question: what discussions did you have before the conflict on
how to provide for the security of the Iraqi people and of the
installations important to normal civilian life?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I know
it is very easy to be wise after the event and I am not accusing
you of being so at all. The things we thought would happen, particularly
with regard to humanitarian aid and so on, were there and plain
for everybody to see. The things which were not plain and there
for everybody to see were, for example, how quickly when the Iraqi
remnants of the police, because they were part of the old regime
structure, were not there, quite literally tens of thousands of
Iraqi people took their ire and frustration of years of Baathist
rule out on things we would never have expected: hospitals, schools,
police stations and so on. When you couple that also with the
fact that Saddam let out—I cannot remember how many—several
thousands of prisoners and criminals who went out and did what
criminals do best in life, it is still to an extent a problem
which faces us. They go out and blow up power cables so they can
get the copper and smelt it down. We have found a couple of smelting
works in Basra. All that sort of stuff. We have ended up with
a completely different situation to the one we had envisaged.
I am not sure how foreseeable that really was. It was a miscalculation
in terms of not perhaps understanding the psyche of what would
happen when the yoke of Baathism was lift from an oppressed people.
Q1819 Mike Gapes: Did you make any plans
for suicide bombers and terrorist activities in the post-conflict
situation?
Mr Lee: I would interpret that
as coming under the general preparation and force protection which
any military force would have in a situation like this. I defer
to Clive as to whether there was anything specific on suicide
bombers.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I have
to say I am not aware of any such planning, beyond the usual.
The force protection measures which were envisaged were to do
with the various levels of Iraqi military forces which, as you
are aware, go from the enforced squaddy type soldier who was not
really a bother, right through to the ranked structure, those
people who would be hard line regime loyalist elements, including
of course Saddam's most capable and loyal regiments who were very
close to the centre of the hierarchy. It was from those in particular
that we expected the most difficult fighting. We hoped, and indeed
it came to pass, that some of the other elements did not come
out of their laagers, they did not fight hard and so on. I do
not recall ever seeing an assessment that we would be subjected
to significant amounts or any significant amounts of suicide type
attacks in the aftermath. I do not recall seeing that.
3 Ev Back
| 
