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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (26808)	8/30/2003 12:16:08 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Why didn't Blair prepare for post-Saddam Iraq? Another day, another soldier dead - and still no end to the chaos in sight Jonathan Steele Friday August 29, 2003 The Guardian With the latest death of a serviceman in Iraq, the number of British troops killed by hostile fire since George Bush declared major combat operations to be over now exceeds the wartime toll. The same grim statistics apply to US forces, but while alarm in the US is gradually growing, the mood in Britain is calmer. It may be because absolute numbers of British deaths are lower, or because people in this country are more realistic about war. They find the American "zero-casualty" syndrome more akin to an arcade game than the genuine risks of the battlefield. Britain, as the Hutton inquiry shows, is also still more exercised about the past, namely the justification given for the war, than about the present danger in Iraq. But there are links between the two that deserve examination and have only briefly been touched by Hutton and his lawyers, with their narrow terms of reference. The prime minister yesterday was given the softest of rides. They did not probe the glaring inconsistency between the statement last September from Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat and Tony Blair's foreword to the weapons dossier that the threat was current. They did not explore the point that intelligence professionals were split on the degree of threat. Sometimes, of course, intelligence is wrong on fundamentals - as looks increasingly clear from the postwar failure to get any of the imprisoned Iraqi officials to say there were weapons of mass destruction, or indeed to find them. The prime minister has accepted the fallibility of intelligence himself. The spooks got their assessment of Iraq wrong on one key point, he told parliament recently, when they advised him of inter-ethnic violence once Saddam Hussein was toppled. In a remarkably unreported answer at the House of Commons liaison committee on July 8, Blair said: "Someone was asking me earlier about what was the intelligence about what we might find and you can never be sure. I think there were a lot of concerns that maybe Iraq would splinter into the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis around Baghdad, the Shias down in the south and the country would start to pull apart, but that has not been the case actually; most of them want to come together and to work together." Blair's comment amounted to the closest we have got to an official admission that some thinking was done about the postwar politics of Iraq. Every day that passes suggests that while the intelligence analysis erred on the side of pessimism in its talk of Iraq falling apart, it was hopelessly optimistic on other matters. It appears to have failed completely to predict the postwar sabotage and resistance that the US and Britain would meet. It is hard to believe that a prime minister would go to war without a best-case and worst-case assessment of the risks facing British forces not only during combat but in the period afterwards. He would also need to calculate what chance there was that war might make certain things, such as the impetus and opportunities for anti-western terrorism, worse. Blair asked for a dossier on WMD, but did he request the intelligence services to give him an equivalent assessment of the range of likely postwar political scenarios with some judgments on each one's probability? If so, was it treated as an issue of major importance in which, as with the WMD controversy, he would insist on micro-managing the issue with key advisers and discussing how strong the evidence was? Did he query whether a majority of Iraqis was really likely to welcome a foreign invasion, however high-minded the invaders' stated motives were? And would Iraqi happiness at Saddam's departure quickly be qualified by anger at the postwar chaos? Did Blair ask whether Saddam's regime might abandon Baghdad without a major fight and start a guerrilla struggle? Was resistance likely to have enough popular support and acquiescence so that the coalition would find it hard to get information to stamp it out, as Lt General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander, admitted yesterday? The Department for International Development, the UN and the aid agencies did well in planning for worst-case humanitarian scenarios. They got ready for a possible refugee and food supply crisis. They did not say it was inevitable but like any good implementing agency they prepared for the worst. Where were the British and the US governments' contingency measures on the political side? Why didn't they have a range of responses to cover all options beyond the wish for cheering crowds in the streets? In his appearance before the Commons liaison committee, apart from saying the intelligence agencies were concerned that Iraq might collapse into ethnic and religious tension, Blair was evasive. He ducked a question on what planning had been done for postwar Iraq but implied there was little. Blithely, he commented that what has happened was "a pretty foreseeable consequence irrespective of intelligence". Does he mean looting, a common feature of postwar regime change in any country? British troops watched it happen when Yugoslav forces left Kosovo in 1999. It went on in southern Iraq 12 years ago when Saddam Hussein's forces retreated in the face of an uprising. But if it was "pretty foreseeable", why didn't Britain and the US send in more military police to secure public buildings immediately? Does he mean gratitude being swamped by disappointment over the coalition's failure to provide security, electricity and water? Then why didn't the US and Britain have a larger team of water and electrical experts on standby to go in on the first day of peace? The evidence suggests that Blair's prewar planning did not go much beyond "War worked in Kosovo. War worked in Afghanistan. It will work in Iraq." Now, in the postwar chaos, Blair's line is "History will forgive me". One of the many sensational documents produced by the Hutton inquiry is a note by Alastair Campbell last month, urging Blair to be "more combative" with MPs. Campbell listed the evidence that Blair had done the right thing in Iraq. Item number one was "the joy on the faces of the children" in Basra. It is shaming that a prime minister should get such juvenile advice, and to his credit Blair rejected this point when he addressed the Commons. But Blair's overall thinking is not much better. The Hutton inquiry has provided a tantalising glimpse of the WMD debate. We need a much broader window into the apparent vacuum where the government's and the intelligence services's prewar assessment of the challenges of post-Saddam Iraq ought to have been. j.steele@guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk