Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1820-1839)
17 DECEMBER 2003
MR EDWARD
CHAPLIN OBE, MS
CAROLYN MILLER,
AIR VICE
MARSHAL CLIVE
LOADER OBE AND
MR IAN
LEE
Q1820 Mike Gapes: To your knowledge,
do you think the United States did?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I know
you have to ask them the question, but I do not recall seeing
any such assessment.
Q1821 Mr Havard: You were planning about
the security situation, but we find ourselves now in circumstances
where there is a catastrophic collapse, the whole machinery has
collapsed. Was there any planning in London and/or the US for
those particular circumstances, when the whole machine collapses?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I do
not think there was in the stark terms in which you lay the question.
It is all a matter of degree. Certainly wound into the planning
was the requirement that we would have to provide, not least of
all legally as the occupying powers, we are under legal obligation,
protection for the civilians in the areas in which we found ourselves
responsible post the conflict. That most certainly was understood.
Q1822 Mr Havard: So there was planning
for transition to a new state, but not necessarily catastrophic
collapse immediately of the existing state.
Mr Lee: I would say that there
was planning to cope with instability and some security difficulties,
lawlessness, some degree of looting and so on, but not the capacity
to deal with that situation on the scale that it turned out to
be.
Q1823 Mr Havard: Some people have commented
on the speed of the war-fighting and its advance through the country
and the transition from war-fighting to peace-keeping and stability
activities was made more difficult because the speed of the advance
basically created circumstances which had not been planned for.
Do you have any comments about that?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: Apart
from the fact that it is a happy circumstance to a large extent.
I ought to make that point. We moved—the Americans particularly—on
the ground far more quickly than we had dared hope.
Q1824 Mr Havard: How do you factor this
process into the planning?
Mr Lee: There was a bracket of
the length of time that the major conflict would go on and the
speed with which that phase ended did not really affect the situation.
I see no reason to suppose that the same situation could not have
occurred with an even faster collapse, if such a thing had been
possible, or if it had taken a month or two longer to achieve
the end of the major combat phase, the same problems of security
could have occurred then. I do not see a particular relationship
between the speed and that situation.
Q1825 Mr Havard: May I turn the question
another way up in a sense and it may be more difficult? Was the
planning—I am not trying to suggest it was deficient—which
was undertaken effectively relying on the fact that the war-fighting
phases were likely to be longer than they actually turned out
to be, so effectively the rest of the plans could not be put into
place, because the original assumption of the period of time was
based on a longer period of war-fighting. So you could not carry
out the plans because you were reliant on that period of time.
Mr Lee: No, I do not remember
it like that.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I do
not think so. As a military man, very definitely the shorter and
the less destructive the better and that would always have been
uppermost in our minds. I do not think there was a "We hope
this or that piece of ground or this or that effect will take
a certain amount of time because if it takes less than that we
will not have done the necessary Phase 4 planning or whatever".
That was never in our minds at all.
Q1826 Mr Havard: In the post-conflict
phase were there things you did plan for but at the end of the
day they simply could not be implemented by the forces on the
ground? If there were, what were they?
Mr Lee: We have covered that to
some extent. We did have plans for larger humanitarian problems
than in fact turned out to be the case. There were greater stocks
of tentage and emergency ration packs and those kinds of things
than were actually needed because the food situation was not as
bad as we might have feared. In that sense, there were things
which did not happen which we had planned for and we have already
covered the looting and the security question where things happen
on a scale which was beyond what we were expecting.
Chairman: You will be pleased to know
that we have now completed the second question. Our planning was
not so hot either, so we are not throwing too many stones in your
direction.
Q1827 Mr Viggers: To what extent did
your plans envisage the early availability of Iraqi police and
soldiers to maintain law and order? Were you relying on that?
Mr Lee: We are back on the same
issue to an extent there. There was an assumption in our plans
that there would be Iraqi police and to some extent Iraqi Army
who could be used to provide a certain level of security. I do
not think we assumed, certainly in the case of the Iraqi civil
police, that they would all melt away to the extent they did and
that we would have to start again from scratch in putting together
a police force.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: Another
point here is that with regard to the acceptability of local leaders,
tribal and so on, with whom we thought we could engage and we
could harness their influence in exerting a stabilising influence
on towns, villages and whatever, we were told quite rapidly that
one of the people we thought was the sort of person who would
be able to do this, was not acceptable to the people of that town.
It was an indication that you cannot impose upon people who have
certain views about ex Baathist people who in their perception
have benefited from the previous regime. It did not matter about
the skill sets, their leadership qualities and other things; if
they were not acceptable, we could not use them. It would perhaps
be fair to say that we were on a learning curve in the early stages
as regards those sorts of nuances.
Q1828 Mr Havard: A question has been
asked in different ways many times, about why we were unable to
use the Iraqi armed services to maintain law and order. What was
the rationale behind disbanding it in the event that no other
structure was left other than this in order to give you some capacity
to provide?
Mr Lee: There are two parts to
this. One is a military question and I have already said that
most of the Iraqi army, in fact the conscripts who did not want
to be in the army in the first place, so the low level, most of
them just disappeared off back to their home villages. So there
was no one to work with. The second part of the question is slightly
more political and it is about this issue of de-Baathification.
Q1829 Mr Havard: So you now had a bunch
of ex soldiers who were not getting paid who were unemployed and
adding to your problem rather than helping.
Mr Chaplin: De-Baathification
became a very important issue and a difficult decision had to
be made there. There were very strong feelings, particularly from
those who had suffered most under Saddam Hussein, which included
of course in the south where we were operating. They were simply
not going to accept that someone who had visibly benefited from
the rule of Saddam Hussein could be back in a position of power,
even though they might have other qualities which would mean they
could run an efficient administration. So we were starting from
scratch in a more fundamental way than we had perhaps expected.
This was one of the decisions which was taken centrally. Bremer
felt—and one could see his point—that there had to
be consistency across the country in this. So a decision was taken
about the levels of the civil service and indeed of police and
military where people would simply not be allowed to continue
in those jobs. I think it is very difficult. You have to reach
a balance in making that decision.
Q1830 Mr Havard: May I ask you an impossible
question then? What else might have helped in the circumstances
in which you find yourselves to provide in the immediate aftermath
some sort of restoration of structure and law and order?
Mr Chaplin: It is a difficult
question. I suppose a much finer grained understanding of the
local politics in different localities which would affect your
judgment on what would and would not be acceptable, but we could
not realistically have expected to have that.
Q1831 Mr Havard: You do not see any way
of pulling together more informal structures which operate within
the community as a way. Is that happening now?
Mr Chaplin: That did happen and
we can talk about that. Very quickly, and this happened first
in Basra because that was the first liberated city, the military
was in contact with leading figures in the local community and
set up a local committee which started to get involved very much
in putting daily life back together again. That was pretty effective.
Q1832 Mr Havard: Did that feature as
part of your initial planning?
Mr Chaplin: Yes, that clearly
you wanted the Iraqis to take responsibility again as soon as
possible for as much as possible of the daily civilian life.
Q1833 Mr Viggers: In this country we
must have people with a deep knowledge of Iraq and they must have
been capable of advising on the issues which have just been referred
to, yet from a different quarter people were saying—I am
thinking particularly about the United States—that we would
be unleashing the forces of democracy, when it does not take very
much knowledge to know that there was not much force for democracy
within Iraq. Were informed people not listened to? Where did the
sort of intelligence come from?
Mr Chaplin: It is perhaps a little
unfair to describe US assumptions in the way that you have. What
I can answer on our own behalf is that there is a lot of expertise
in this country, particularly in the academic community and the
Foreign Office were certainly in touch with those sorts of people
as part of their day to day work. The Middle East and North Africa
research group which works in my part of the Foreign Office would
be constantly in touch with experts. However, it is a bit different
translating that into a prediction about how, in the aftermath
of a war which brought to an end a very long period of autocratic
rule and in an extremely closed society, people would react, and
I do not think academics would be any better than we at predicting
how people would react once that regime had been swept away. We
were all guessing, some perhaps guessed better than others. It
is not fair to say that the Americans expected democracy to spring
spontaneously from the aftermath of a conflict. You can read articles
by people outside the administration who would take that view,
but I do not think it was seriously the view within the US administration.
Q1834 Mike Gapes: DFID pointed out the
effect that the looting and sacking of government buildings and
banks had on the inability of the coalition to resume normal administrative
functions in the society. Was the importance of securing the banks
and government buildings considered and discussed before the conflict?
What was the outcome of those discussions, given that took place?
Ms Miller: That was one of the
things discussed. It comes back to the point which was being made
earlier about the scale on which it happened that we had not planned
for. Yes, we knew that security would have to be provided, but
the size of the task made it quite difficult then to help get
a lot of these things up and running because it took longer to
get security in place before that happened.
Q1835 Mike Gapes: Was that because you
did not have enough forces trained and capable of doing that because
the American military were configured the way they were?
Mr Lee: I do not know. It is possible
to speculate that if we ever had a huge number of extra forces
available, then they might be able to do more in providing security.
It is fairly obvious, if we are saying the scale was greater,
that one answer to that might be to have a greater scale of numbers
on the coalition side. Whether that was practical or foreseeable
is another question.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: I do
not think it is really realistic. I understand the question but
Basra is a city of about 2.2 million people, as I recall, so one
third of London. Imagine how many people you would have to flood
in militarily to stop a large proportion of that city wanting
to go and loot their local police station, hospital, library,
school and so on. It just made for an impossible task. Once the
indigenous Iraqi organs of suppression had melted away, it was
just too much for the available military forces.
Q1836 Chairman: But there were key points.
Air Vice Marshal Loader: Yes;
that is true.
Q1837 Chairman: Banks, museums, hospitals.
So was it not possible, or was it done?
Air Vice Marshal Loader: Coming
back to something which was said earlier on, right at the planning
phase we wanted to ensure that the wealth of the country, particularly
with regard to oil production, would be very quickly realisable
and I think six oil well heads were actually fired out of the
many hundreds which were there. We thought that was an enormous
success in that it was for us one of the main things we felt we
had to do. That was why air and ground activity happened pretty
much coincidentally, so we could get people into those important
places. Maybe in retrospect we should have put a few more to the
banks or hospitals and schools, but that would have been at the
expense of something else.
Q1838 Mike Gapes: It has been suggested
to us in evidence that there was a lack of civilian organisations
which could come in and fix the electrical grid and various other
things and that the military just did not have the scale and capability
to deal with all of that. Was any thought given at the planning
stage to how that civilian infrastructure could be restored and
maintained? Have any lessons been learned in the light of the
conflict about how civilian infrastructures can be secured and
maintained?
Mr Lee: This is another area where
thought was given to this and there were capabilities within the
military, certainly to do remedial activity on power supplies,
water supplies, up to a certain point. Clearly in the immediate
period, when the situation is still not secure, you are not going
to be able to get civil contractors in to do that sort of work.
The capacity of the military is going to be limited, so you do
have a potential there of a difficulty to overcome. There is a
time lag question before you can get civil contractors under way
to improve the infrastructure. Now we have overcome that time
lag and DFID and the CPA are funding that sort of infrastructure
remediation which is going on now.
Q1839 Mike Gapes: How would you react
to the suggestion that perhaps we should have a civil organisation,
perhaps an international one which is capable of quickly moving
into those kinds of situations to do precisely that?
Mr Chaplin: It is a fair point
and it is one of the things which will be considered in the Whitehall
exercise which is going about how you would deal with a similar
post-conflict situation in the future, how it is possible to generate
resources more quickly and what sort of resources you need. There
are certainly some lessons to be learned.
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