Hoon: Iraq war support 'not unconditional'
Updated on 19 January 2010
Tony Blair was never unconditionally committed to going to war and Britain's involvement was not inevitable, insists the former defence secretary Geoff Hoon when giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry.
Mr Hoon, whose time in the job included both the run-up to war and its bloody aftermath, is the first member of Tony Blair's cabinet to appear before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.
At issue today: the decision to use force against Saddam Hussein, the extent of military planning for a potential conflict, and Britain's involvement in the aftermath of the invasion.
As the session started a previously unpublished letter from the then Attorney General was made public, revealing that Lord Goldsmith complained that Mr Hoon had put him in a "difficult position" by claiming Britain would be "perfectly entitled" to use force against Iraq without a specific United Nations mandate.
Almost a full year before the invasion in 2003, Lord Goldsmith warned that he was not aware of material showing an imminent threat from Iraq and said that at that point, he had not been asked to advise on the legality of possible military action.
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At the the inquiry, Mr Hoon was questioned in more detail about Lord Goldsmith's legal advice, in light of the letter.
"I was clear he felt military action had been justified," Mr Hoon insisted. And he said everyone, including the chief of the defence staff had "quite rightly" been pressing for a clear legal judgement for some time.
'Constrained, but not eliminated'
Mr Hoon said Britain's attitude towards military force had always been conditional, putting a peaceful strategy of diplomacy and containment first and foremost.
But, he said, it became clear that politically, strategy was not working: Saddam's ambitions were "constrained, but not eliminated", adding that his sense was that the policy was breaking down.
Even so, Mr Hoon insisted, Britain had never been in a position of unconditionally resorting to military action, whatever the Americans were to decide.
In fact, he said he had told his US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld that it all hinged on the vote in the House of Commons in March 2003; if it had gone the wrong way, he said, Britain could not have gone to war.
A full year before that, Tony Blair met President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but Mr Hoon said he had not been directly briefed on the discussions there.
'Quite a big ask'
It was then that military planners started to draw up a range of options including the deployment of land forces. Mr Hoon said at the time, he had considered that option "quite a big ask" and, he said, US planning had not anticipated that Britain would get involved.
Mr Hoon said he had been worried that British forces would struggle to cope with a full scale land deployment to Iraq while they were already committed in Afghanistan. He told the inquiry he had wanted to offer a more limited form of involvement, air and naval support for a US invasion, but said he had been overruled.
As for the aftermath of the war, Mr Hoon denied that planning for what happened after the invasion had been a "disaster", although he conceded that "It didn't go as well as we wanted it to".
As to the extent of Britain's involvement in the post-conflict, peacekeeping effort, he insisted his attitude was to accept advice from the Ministry of Defence about what was possible.
Mr Hoon said as a consequence of poor planning, the MoD had become much more involved with reconstruction. He said people were left doing what they were not meant to, and he was frustrated that other government departments were not contributing more.
Security problems
During Tuesday's afternoon session, Geoff Hoon told the inquiry that the Treasury had been alerted to the possible spending implications of the Iraq war in October 2002, and said there were no difficulties regarding actual amounts or the overall amount of money required.
Discussing security problems faced in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, he told the inquiry that "the problems that developed were not all of one kind". He noted that some of the looting in the country was clearly directed at institutions associated with Saddam Hussein - "This was a way of some of the population getting back at Saddam and his regime."
Moreover, police training, post-invasion, was inadequate. "Part of the plan was that there would be police from the United Kingdom seconded to provide that training. Some went - but not nearly enough.
"And I don't think we had the capability to provide that training to the extent that we wanted."
Hoon also conceded that the ministry of defence had probably not best-suited to train the new Iraq police force.
He went on to claim that the situation had deteriorated in Iraq, post-invasion, because there was a sense that the coalition forces were not delivering the support that people in Basra wanted, although they had done a lot of good, small-scale work.
For example, Basra's power station could not be repaired, as a result of which a new power station had had to be built, which became a long and frustrating saga because the money did not come through for it.
The former defence secretary discussed the difficulties of planning for war while negotiations continued to secure for a UN Security Council resolution. He said the prime minister and then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had told him if the UK was seen to overtly be preparing for war, it would affect our ability to secure a resolution.
Reduced commitment
Mr Hoon told the inquiry it was necessary to reduce the commitment to the Iraq war before taking on the Nato operation in the south of Afghanistan.
"Given our commitment to Iraq, I thought it was better for other countries to take part in Nato operations," he said. "Trying to conduct two missions would mean a significant loss of armed forces.".
And he maintained that the decision to carry out the two missions simultaneously was not taken till after the 2005 election.
He went on: "My agreement to this was conditional - I said we can do this when we draw down from Iraq. The military wanted to be clear they weren't in two operations at once. The two missions happened when I left office as secretary of state. What I was concerned about was the impact on forces of conducting two operations simultaneously."
Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of the invasion, will give evidence in a special three hour session on Thursday: Mr Blair himself will appear on 29 January.
