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- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 January 2010 16.26 GMT
Edward Chaplin, UK ambassador to Iraq from 2004 to 2005. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
On 7 December the Chilcot inquiry heard from Major General Tim Cross and Edward Chaplin. In the run-up to the war Cross was the UK representative to the US office for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance (ORHA), the agency responsible for drawing up plans for postwar Iraq. He subsequently worked for the coalition provisional authority (CPA), which administered Iraq in the aftermath of the war. Chaplin served as UK ambassador to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, the first British envoy in Iraq for 13 years.
Major General Tim Cross
Cross discussed the lack of postwar planning. In a written statement, he said he had briefed Tony Blair at No 10 on 18 March 2003, two days before the invasion."We talked for about 30 minutes or so. I was as honest about the positions as I could be, essentially briefing that I did not believe postwar planning was anywhere near ready. I told him that there was no clarity on what was going to be needed after the military phase of the operation, nor who would provide it. Although I was confident that we would secure a military victory, I offered my view that we should not begin that campaign until we had a much more coherent postwar plan.
"Not everyone believed that there would actually be a war; if there was to be one, then there was certainly no consensus that we [the UK] should be involved; there was no coherent UK … view of what postwar Iraq should look like; there was a serious reluctance to take on the US over their views … there was therefore some seriously wishful and woolly and unjoined-up thinking going on."
In oral evidence, Cross said: "He [Blair] was engaged. I gave him the background of what we had been doing. We had a very sensible conversation. At the end of it I remember saying, in so many words, I had no doubt we will win in the military. I do not believe we are ready for postwar Iraq. He nodded and didn't say anything particular. I didn't expect him to look me in the eye and say, 'This is terrible, we are going to pull the whole thing off.' I was just one of a number of people briefing him … I hesitate to say I used the word 'disaster'. I may well have used the word 'chaotic'.
"It has become very common for people to blame the Americans for all of this. I do just not accept that. We, the UK and we, Whitehall, should have done far more to get our minds round this issue."
Edward Chaplin
On the lack of competence in Ayad Allawi's interim government
"The sheer dysfunctionality, if that's the right word, of the ministerial apparatus was very striking and it was an area in which we gave a lot of our help in the early days."
On the impact of Abu Ghraib prison scandal
"I think Abu Ghraib did huge damage to the whole image of the enterprise and it took a long time to recover from that."
On Iraqi attitudes towards Britain
"If you talked to the tribal chiefs, the sheikhs, they would always start conversations with memories – fond memories, they would claim – of dealing with the British. As you know, Arabs can get quite sentimental about this sort of thing. The facts don't always bear out their memories. So I suppose there was some trust that this was a country that we knew and, of course, we would talk to all concerned. I don't think people held that against us. I think what they held against us was different, it was the way we had handled the run-up, particularly on the Sunni side, the way we had allowed the Iraqi army to be dissolved and the way we had set up the CPA and the way we had set up the new government."
On the lack of troops in the immediate aftermath of invasion
"I would agree with CDS [chief of defence staff] that there should have been more troops on the ground to ensure that basic level of security in the early stages. Once you had lost that, then you were really looking at a counterinsurgency strategy."