Q&A: No plan, No peace

By John Ware
Reporter for No Plan, No Peace

NO PLAN, NO PEACE No Plan, No Peace US and UK play 'blame game' About John Ware

How did the US and UK governments come to invade Iraq with no post-war plan? And how did they get just about everything wrong in their assumptions about what would follow?

The issues were explored in the BBC TV documentary No Plan, No Peace presented by John Ware who here answers readers' and viewers' questions, chosen to represent a broad selection of e-mails.

High unemployment in American cities have fuelled high crime and violence. This is a lesson too well learned. In 1929 the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. The New Deal was a Roosevelt Program to end the Great Depression. Iraq needs rebuilding lets give Iraqi jobs. Let's get the great minds of the world create a plan to get Iraqis back to work ASAP.

Peters, Chicago, US

There is a powerful school of thought that says reviving the Iraqi economy is the key to stability, and ought to take precedence over the quest for security. Here's what Andrew Alderson, who was finance chief to the Coalition Provisional Authority in the South told me:

There was no clear post-war plan for governing Iraq after Saddam's fall

"The ministry of finance in Baghdad is sitting on a large cash surplus, arguably somewhere between $20bn and $30bn (£10bn and £15bn), yet very little is happening in the provinces. Baghdad has, roughly, 40% of the population, 60% of the population is outside Baghdad.

"Unemployment is running at 40% plus, inflation 20% plus, the central bank has moved its interest rate to 23% and the economy has stalled.

"I think the challenge is getting more technical assistance because what remains is an $80bn (£40bn) reconstruction problem and there is a funding gap. But that gap is not going to be filled by the donor community. Arguably $30bn has [already] been spent.

"I say, 'This is fundamental. If you fix the economy the other things will follow.'

"For me the two key drivers are: a) fixing the electricity and b) fixing the financial side. That should be possible because of the oil. Then you can start to generate inward investment. It will come at a price but simply to say 'No, we will focus on security' is not appropriate.

"The route to security, for me, is through the application of practical economics and that means you need to have a robust legal system, you need to generate an ability for people to invest because that's a much longer term process.

"Most post-conflict economies in the long run are re-built by the private sector with companies coming in taking long-term views and committing capital, and that for me is where it has got to come from. It may not be palatable, but I don't see where else it is going to come from unless one goes and talks to Iraq's neighbours, and perhaps also harness some of their petro-dollars.

"But I think what British ministers should be doing is looking at how we can provide that technical financial assistance without necessarily providing cash."

Of course the counter argument is that no-one is going to invest until the security situation radically improves. So this is very much a chicken and egg debate.

It was clear from the very start, when Donald Rumsfeld sacked General Shinseki, that this was going to be a dog's breakfast. Gen. Shinseki upon seeing Rummy's plans said quite clearly. 1) Do not go with less than a quarter million troops. 2) Do not disrupt the basic services of government. 3) Under no circumstances disband the Iraqi Army. His advice, now prophetic, got him the heave ho.

Mark Cortner, Oklahoma, US

The figures on the optimum number of troops vary widely. The Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki told the Senate in February 2003 that he thought "several hundreds thousand soldiers" might be necessary to stabilise Iraq after Saddam had been toppled.

Where did the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell stand on numbers? One of Powell's former senior aides told me: "I do recall him saying to me in Nov 2002: 'I wonder what will happen if we put half a million men on the ground and we don't find WMD.' So I've always taken it that Powell thought half a million would be needed. There were 500,000 for Gulf war One."

On basic services, the US military wanted to keep them running, but they did bomb the phone exchanges in Baghdad to disrupt the Iraqi Command and Control.

As we explained in the programme, the state of the Iraqi infrastructure was infinitely more fragile than the US and UK had assumed.

Paul Bremer issued the order to disband the Iraqi army

With regard to disbanding the army, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who issued this order, argues that the Iraqi army had disbanded itself by abandoning barracks. Bremer's order (CPA Order No 2) does use the word 'disband' but he told me he regrets this because it suggested there was an entity to disband which, as I say, he insists there wasn't.

CPA Order No 2, however, put an end to successful attempts that had been going on before Bremer arrived to establish contact with soldiers to give them paid work to help with the reconstruction of Iraq.

After watching the first part on Sunday 28 Oct there was a clear breach of the sovereignty of Iraq. In the light of all this shouldn't Tony Blair and George Bush be tried for crimes against humanity?

Nathaniel Wynter, Amsterdam

It would be astonishing if Bush and/or Blair were arraigned before an agreed international tribunal. It's certainly true that a sizeable body of opinion in both the US and the UK believes that both President Bush and the former Prime Minister Blair knowingly misled the world - that is, by arguing that the reliability of intelligence reporting that Saddam had WMD was beyond doubt when they knew, or suspected, that this was not the case.

The Blair-Bush vision was to turn Iraq into a stable nation

My own view is that the evidence does not support the accusation of bad faith. I don't think the lie thing washes, actually.

I think there is ample evidence to show that both men genuinely believed that Saddam did have WMD.

It may be argued that their belief was too faith-based as opposed to being founded on solid and objective criteria. Intelligence, after all, is rarely Grade A clinching courtroom quality evidence.

But the fact is that both men have cover from their respective intelligence services, the CIA and in the UK, the Secret Intelligence Service, known sometimes as MI6.

The same defence, it seems to me, is not available in respect of post war planning of which there was some, but nothing like enough, and certainly not joined up.

There are those like Dr Toby Dodge, one of the UK's leading Iraq experts, who has argued that to invade knowing - as Tony Blair did know - that post war preparations were inadequate, amounts to criminally reckless conduct.

No doubt Mr Blair would argue that on balance he had to take that risk because he regarded disarming Saddam as taking precedence and was not something that could wait.

It is easy to make comments like, 'If I had known then what I know now, I would have taken a tougher line with the Americans'. Everyone would have made different choices if they were clairvoyant, even us Americans. I don't see how a comment like this helps any situation, except self-preservation.

Shane, Urbandale, US

You are referring here to the explanation given by Geoff Hoon, at the time the UK Defence Secretary, for telling Parliament in November 2003 that he supported the disbandment of the Iraqi army, whereas in May 2007 he said that the government had argued against it.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have taken a tougher line with the Americans Geoff Hoon Former Defence Secretary

Several members of the cabinet who supported Tony Blair at the time have acknowledged that the assumptions on which their forecast of a manageable post-war period was based, were obviously wrong. That, of course, is simply a statement of the obvious.

Ministers avoid discussing Iraq as much as possible in the UK. Mr Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, has kept his remarks to a minimum. The aftermath, in particular, and the failure to plan properly, has not been the subject of much discussion either.

An elderly relative who saw both our programmes told me afterwards that the absence of any discussion about this was deeply shaming given what has happened to the lives of so many Iraqis.

Given what has been learnt in Iraq and most importantly that culture and their supporting institutions are not packages that can be exported on the whims and fancies of anyone, what has been put in place to ensure that another error of this kind and scale never occurs again? Secondly, all modern civilisation has a recorded history, and the British has a very rich one of successes and failures of overseas ventures and campaigns. To what extent were the rich experience of British history and the knowledge of historians drawn on before committing British support to the American venture in Iraq?

Basil Fletcher, Kingston, Jamaica

This really, Basil, is one of the great mysteries and one that I don't fully understand myself. But you are right.

Whitehall - the administrative centre of government in the UK - we are led to believe, verily throbs with experts when it comes to the Middle East.

There's said to be a body of Arabist expertise within the Foreign Office that is sometimes referred to as the "Camel Corps". And yet this repository of knowledge didn't seem to have any inkling of the huge political and religious energy that would be unleashed by giving the Shia religious freedom after being repressed for so many years. (The one thing MI6 did get right was to forecast that al-Qaeda would hook up with Sunni insurgents).

Nor did the Foreign Office seem to know very much about the way Iraq was run, or what a complex, multi-layered society it was. One of our contributors referred to the powerful pro-Saddam "shadow state" of tribal chiefs and other local elites.

He said that four months before the invasion he warned Tony Blair that this was likely to remain after Saddam was removed and might prove very resistant to occupation, which it did.

The Ministry of Defence has published a "Lessons Learned" document; however we understand there is a further "Lessons Learned" document which was to have been published but which hasn't yet seen the light of day. Clearly until it does, the lessons learned will be limited.

The Justice Minister Jack Straw has said that he believes there will be a public inquiry into Iraq. However Mr Straw said this while Mr Blair was still Prime Minister. There was been no such commitment from his successor in No 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown.

If there is an inquiry, the failure to plan properly for the aftermath is likely to be its main focus because there have been a number of inquiries, of varying depth, into how the intelligence on WMD was invested with such credibility, when in reality it came from a limited number of sources and some through an untested reporting chain.

There remains a belief that the heads of MI6 - which supplies the intelligence - and the Joint Intelligence Committee - which assess it in conjunction with other material - were too ready to accommodate Mr Blair and that, consciously or not, they adapted their judgements to fit his beliefs.

What exactly did the US government believe would happen to the hundreds of thousands of suddenly unemployed Iraqis? Especially since 400,000 of them were trained killers, having been in the army... I'm baffled as to why disbandment and de-baathification was even considered.... I know what I would have done if I was in that situation and I had a family to feed.

Clare Homer, Birmingham

Let's take CPA Order No 1, de-baathification, first. Some de-baathification was inevitable because the ruling Baath party was generally loathed by the majority Shia. For the coalition to have any credibility with the Shia, it was assessed that a purge would need to take place. As Mr Blair has said: "The pressure was all to de-baathify faster," and he's right.

The debate was over how deep. The British appear to have thought it should be confined to the first two, perhaps three, seniority layers of the party, though the government had not come to a settled view by the time Bremer issued both his debaathifcation and disbandment orders.

His de-baathifcation order went to a fourth level. This was interpreted in some cases as covering, for example, teachers so that in parts of Iraq there was very severe disruption to schools.

Bremer himself says that was never his intention and he blames a committee of Iraqis, headed by the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and made up of members from the governing council for having "implemented (the order) in a way which went beyond the scope of what we intended by our decree, as I told Chalabi at the time."

With regard to the army, the consequences of formally disbanding an organisation which was held in high esteem by Iraqis were seen as obvious to the likes of General Jay Garner, who Bremer succeeded, and members of Garner's team. They say they protested vigorously to Bremer at the time.

Someone should tell John Ware that peace was never the plan. The war was prosecuted solely in the political interest of Israel because Iraq was the Zionist entity's chief Arab enemy. Therefore, the total dismemberment and annihilation of the Iraqi nation was and is the intention, beginning with the burning of the Iraqi National Library, followed by sectarian war, which was the clear purpose of the "constitution" urged upon the flunkies that the US installed.

Ronald Schleyer, Minnesota, US

Is it obvious that the US and UK invaded Iraq to accomplish the "dismemberment and annihilation of the Iraqi nation"? No! This ascribes an apocalyptic motive to both governments which I don't think is warranted.

The idea of a broken up Iraq being in anyone's strategic interest, least of all the US's and UK's, defeats me, I must say.

In fact one of the more astonishing failures of pre-war planning was the absence of any consideration of the possible consequences of the outcome, especially the loss of a unitary identity of Iraq.

The minute there is anything that remotely looks like an autonomous Kurdish political entity; there would be a Turkish intervention, and quite possibly an Iranian intervention. The minute there was anything that looked like a free standing entity with the borders of Iran having moved West by 400 miles, the Sunni entity would be threatened inviting adventurism from Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

These would be profoundly dangerous outcomes that would create the outline for the next round of conflict within the whole region.

No, how to achieve peace may not have been properly planned for, but it is clearly in the interests of the US and the rest of the coalition that peace should be achieved.

You say that furthering the "political interest of Israel" was the driving force for the invasion. But it's hard to see how the invasion has been in Israel's interest.

Isn't it the case that today Israel feels much more threatened by Iran than ever it did by Iraq? You will recall that Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described Israel as a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth". Few would disagree that Iran has been emboldened by Saddam's removal.

I believe that both Washington and London knew that Iraq had no WMD, nor was there complicity in 9/11. I think it was over oil.

Charles Goodman, US

I don't agree that either Washington or London knew Iraq had no WMD. The reverse, in my opinion is true, and I think overall the intelligence services also believed this, though there were certainly some within the services who had their doubts.

That's the point about intelligence: over the years we've invested it with mythical status but it's not and never has been an exact science, and the assessments of its credibility were stripped of their caveats here and in Washington.

Members of the Bush Administration did link Iraq directly with al-Qaeda. In the UK, Mr Blair was more circumspect. He was careful not to assert a direct link but he did say that he feared there would be one in time if Saddam was not disarmed.

John Ware reported on the series, No plan, No peace, first broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 28 October 2007 and Monday 29 October.