Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1996
- 1999)
WEDNESDAY 21 JANUARY 2004
MR EDWARD
CHAPLIN CMG OBE, MS
CAROLYN MILLER,
AIR VICE
MARSHAL CLIVE
LOADER OBE AND
MR IAN
LEE
Q1996 Chairman: Welcome. I
must apologise for dragging you back. When we reach the end of
a session we often find we have failed to meet our target, but
we have never fallen so far short of our objectives as we did
when you came to give evidence to us last time and this is basically
an opportunity for us to put the remaining questions to you. Thank
you for coming. Congratulations, Mr Chaplin, on your meritorious
elevation. The aim of part two is to ascertain how the different
arms of Government interacted in their planning for the post-conflict
situation in Iraq; how successfully these plans were implemented;
and are there any lessons to be learned. Looking at the document
published by the Ministry of Defence, it had one particularly
spectacular sentence that I want to draw to your attention, which
is, "It was only after the fall of the regime that the extent
of Ba'ath party domination of nearly all aspects of the Iraq state
and society became clear. The impact of the sudden collapse of
the regime was enormous, with the removal not only of top officials
but the whole of senior and most of middle management." What
aspects of Ba'ath party domination of Iraqi state and society
did you fail to understand before the conflict? If you are saying
the system did not fully understand how a deck of cards was going
to collapse so swiftly then what the hell was intelligence doing,
what were all of those experts across the machinery of Government
trying to convey? I can understand why it is not possible to find
weapons of mass destruction hidden in the sand in Iraq, but it
really does seem to me bizarre that, with the weight of British
academia, American academia and the British Civil Service, the
military did not seem to be aware of the fact that a near totalitarian
state dominated institutions so enormously and we were surprised
at what happened when that regime had been defeated. Who is kicking
off? Mr Chaplin, you can start off.
Mr Chaplin: Thank you, Mr Chairman.
I think we did cover part of this at our last session. It really
comes down to this question of the "De-Ba'athification"
process that had to be handled after the regime had disappeared.
Of course we knew the extent of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's
regime and about the Ba'ath party apparatus he used, but also
the other manipulation that he practised, all the aspects of the
society, how wide and deep that went. I think what perhaps we
and others had under-estimated was the extent to which there would
still be problems after that regime had gone because as I was
describing last time, a judgment had to be made about how far
you went with De-Ba'athification and the tension there was between
obviously not preserving in positions of status or power people
who had been very closely associated with the Saddam Hussein regime
but at the same time finding people who were capable, at a local
level at least, and that is where we were helping with the restarting
of the administration. Perhaps what we under-estimated was the
extent to which popular resentment of the Saddam Hussein regime
was so powerful. Certainly in the initial weeks and months anyone
with even a relatively light association with the regime was seen
as a clone of the regime and therefore was unacceptable and that
did cause some problems. The other thing is the extent to which
those long years of tyranny had robbed ordinary Iraqi people of
any sense of their ability to make decisions about their own future
and it was some time before people were willing to come forward
because, if you had a political culture in which the only way
to stay safe was to be silent and say nothing, it is obviously
quite an adjustment to make when you are being encouraged by outside
forces that are coming in saying, "It's alright, the regime
has gone and now we want you to take responsibility for your own
affairs." It is quite an adjustment to ask people to make
at all levels, including the political level. I think I referred
to the Nasiriyah conference on 15 April last year, the first political
conference so to speak and the automatic reaction of Iraqis was
to say, "Tell us what we should do," to which our response
was, "No. We want you to decide what the first steps are
for the future of Iraq," and I think it is that aspect we
perhaps under-estimated. We were in touch with all sorts of sources
of expertise on Iraq, including the academic community. Perhaps
some of them had better estimates of what we would find when we
got there. I do not know that anyone got it right. Perhaps some
guessed better than others. I do not know whether my colleagues
want to add anything.
Q1997 Chairman: Defend your
employer, Mr Lee! Let me repeat, "It was only after the fall
of the regime that the extent of Ba'ath party domination of nearly
all aspects of the Iraq state and society became clear".
Mr Lee: I would agree with what
Edward has just said. We had made assessments of the nature of
the domination as it were from the top down, that Saddam Hussein
and his inner circle had control over the security apparatus of
the state and, beyond that, had exercised a good deal of control
over any public appointments. Anyone in any position of authority
obviously had to have some sort of allegiance to the regime. So
there was a picture of the situation in that respect. What I do
not think was clear before the event and I am not sure whether
it could have been clear to anyone, was the extent to which the
people on the receiving end of this state apparatus were oppressed
by it and there was a difficulty in predicting their behaviour
after the state apparatus was removed. We probably assumed that
a good number of people within the apparatus, let us say at middle
ranking level, were in the positions not really because they wanted
to be but because they felt they had to be and that when the top
layers were removed then they would still be there and the people
beneath that, the police force for example, the actual policemen
on the ground, would be able to play a part by assisting the coalition
forces. In fact what seemed to happen, as Edward has described,
is that no one remained in any position of authority at all and
the entire apparatus more or less disintegrated straightaway.
The conscript soldiers had melted away back to their homes, as
I said in the last session and the police also disappeared off
the street, so there was pretty much a vacuum and I think we had
not expected it to be quite as fundamental as it was in that sense.
Q1998 Chairman: Thank you.
Ms Miller, did DfID see things more clearly?
Ms Miller: We were very aware
of the extent of the domination. We were also very aware from
some research and analysis that we had commissioned—and
we did fund some agencies on the ground prior to the war—that
these systems that they had were very efficient and there were
very highly skilled officials running a number of these and we
felt that at least at this middle level those people would be
available to carry on and that we would actually be able to support
relatively early on the Iraqi take back of a number of their services.
We were also more surprised than, obviously in hindsight, we should
have been at the extent of the collapse. Perhaps in some of the
areas that we have been dealing with like health and education
it has actually been easier to get those back up and running and
they have moved faster. Those were the areas that we were concentrating
on. We were equally wrong in not anticipating the problem.
Q1999 Chairman: Was there
a difference between Basra's problems and the rest of the country
in terms of the total penetration of the regime through every
aspect of society?
Mr Chaplin: I think the main difference
in the southern part of the country, largely Shia, was the scale
of resentment against the former regime and the extent to which
the factors we have described apply. There were other problems
in other parts of the country.
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