In early March 2003, as Britain and America prepared to invade Iraq, a
casually dressed Tony Blair unexpectedly walked into the room at 10 Downing
Street where Major General Tim Cross had just briefed Alastair Campbell,
Blair’s communications chief. Cross was Britain’s point man in Washington on
postwar planning and he was not getting a “warm feeling” about it. Campbell
was clearly uneasy. For the next half-hour Cross briefed Blair.
The heart of the matter was simple: postwar planning was completely
incoherent. “The plan was, we do not need a plan,” said Cross last week.
“As we teased out the issues, Blair listened and questioned. None of it seemed
to come as much of a surprise. Indeed, it seemed to reinforce what he was
starting to pick up from elsewhere.”
He remembered telling Blair: “We want to be jolly careful that we don’t start
this war until we know how we are going to finish it. And I, for one, am far
from clear on how we are going to do that.”
Cross knew what he was talking about. He had been a logistics commander during
the 1991 Gulf war and his skill in postwar planning had been honed in
Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo.
He left Downing Street with a nagging fear that Blair did not understand what
was really going to be needed to deliver a stable or reconstructed Iraq: “I
knew, liked and respected Blair from our earlier operations in the Balkans.
But he didn’t seem to have the instinct for or understand the scope and
complexity of what was going to be needed in the aftermath of an invasion. I
don’t think he understood what the possible consequences could be.”
For Cross, the story of Iraq is one of a failure of leadership. Talking for
the first time about this failure, he said: “We got it wrong. We
underestimated the resources we would need to see the campaign through. We
underestimated the amount of time we would need.
“Northern Ireland had taken over 30 years, the Balkans has already taken over
10, so it follows that Iraq would need more than a few weeks or months. We
failed to recognise the amount of money and talent – both military and
nonmilitary – that would also be required.”
The failure to plan was a failure across Whitehall – not just across
Washington. There was no clearly accepted “end state”, no consensus on what
we wanted to achieve; nor was there a coherent and joined-up
pan-governmental “campaign plan”.
“Taking a democracy to war is pretty obviously a serious business and we
didn’t take it anywhere near seriously enough,” said Cross, the most senior
insider to talk on the record about the planning catastrophe.
He first became involved in the autumn of 2002 when he was ordered to
establish the logistics headquarters for possible operations in Iraq which
he set up at Northwood, northwest London, the permanent joint headquarters.
In the following months he crisscrossed the Atlantic as momentum built
towards invasion.
In February 2003 he went to Washington to join the team run by Jay Garner, the
retired three-star general in charge of US postwar planning. Cross’s mission
was to find out what was happening. He sent daily reports to London from the
British embassy.
It took him more than two weeks just to get the necessary clearance to go in
and out of the Pentagon without having to be escorted constantly around the
building.
He was alarmed that at this crucial time there was no British ambassador in
the American capital. Christopher Meyer had just returned to the UK and it
made Cross wonder if the government truly understood the scale of what it
was taking on.
Even with operations looking imminent, there were no answers to some serious
questions. How would we reconstruct Iraq’s economy? What currency would we
use? What would we do with the judiciary and the police? There was no war
cabinet as there had been during the Falklands campaign. It was only in
February, just weeks before the war began, that the Foreign Office
established the Iraq Planning Unit (IPU). Dominic Chilcott, the diplomat who
headed it, “was an excellent man, but he had a tiny team around him, far
smaller even than Garner’s”, said Cross. “The IPU was on to a loser from the
start. It was never going to be able to deliver a joined-up and coherent
postwar plan in the time then available.”
What frightened him was the Washington neoconservatives’ certainty that once
the Americans and British arrived, Iraqi oil revenue would rebuild the
country: “Too many people lost themselves in the luxury of political theory
and forgot or chose to ignore the practical realities of what was actually
going to happen on the ground, and that was at the heart of the planning
blight.
“The cabal in Washington convinced themselves that they didn’t need a plan
because everything would be fine once Saddam Hussein was toppled . . . There
were few dissenting voices; you either agreed with their paradigm or you
were frozen out.”
He added: “What they didn’t seem to understand was that you cannot bring true
democracy to these fragile places in less than a generation or two.”
As for Britain, “it was apparent that Whitehall had got itself locked into the
US way of thinking, not realising just how little America understood of the
issues. When we got to Iraq and things started to go wrong there was just
this stunned silence. There was no reserve to fill the vacuum, no ability to
rethink the issues”.
Garner “was very good at not appearing to be disloyal, but it was pretty clear
that he was finding it very frustrating. He would be in meetings for hours
and return irritated. He couldn’t seem to get the authority to drive things
forward. We knew it was chaos.” In addition: “Garner didn’t have sufficient
resources from the start or the necessary authority over the military. He
was given a small planning team of regular American military and a slack
handful of other people, including his retired buddies, who were good
people.”
But he was not in the Beltway loop and so had no more knowledge about the war
plan than he found in the newspapers. Garner tried to recruit key staff from
across Washington but found those not part of the neocon fraternity were
withheld by the defence department.
The war was obviously going to start and Garner wanted to get his people out
on the ground. But, said Cross, “he didn’t have a piece of paper that made
it clear he was in charge. The military never saw him as the boss, in fact
they didn’t know what to make of him. It was unclear what his position was,
so he never had the authority to say to the head of the US forces that he
was in charge”.
At a lunch with a gung-ho Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, before
leaving Washington, Cross found himself shut out when he raised the key
issues of available force ratios, the lack of a reserve and the overriding
need to internationalise the reconstruction.
Garner’s team was being built agonisingly slowly. He ended up leaving
Washington for Kuwait to await the invasion with fewer than 100 people and
with 77 posts still empty. This was the team the Americans sent to rebuild
Iraq. “He wanted to be an enabler,” said Cross, who is immensely fond of
Garner, “and he was a hugely loved and capable leader, but I sensed a
general lack of understanding of what was going to hit them.”
En route to Kuwait, Cross stopped in London to talk to Campbell. He found him
both helpful and proactive in arranging a much-needed and sadly lacking
media team to work with Garner. It was during this discussion that Campbell
left the room and returned with the prime minister.
As late as April, Cross still had no sense of what Britain wanted out of the
war and what the government thought Iraq should look like once it was over:
“The only thing that was made clear to me was that they did not want
to be seen to be acting in any way that looked like they supported the
division of Iraq, which was fair enough.”
As the lead-up to the invasion intensified, Cross became Garner’s official
coalition deputy. But there was still no senior Foreign Office person in
place to oversee the political reconstruction. Cross told Jack Straw, the
foreign secretary, who visited Kuwait, that he needed a political “driver”
alongside him, someone to influence political events. Straw responded by
telling Cross that he was doing a great job and left things as they were.
By the time Garner and Cross got to Baghdad in early April, in the wake of the
invasion, things on the ground were worse than they had anticipated.
“Even with my misgivings I did not realise what a mess the place would be in,”
Cross said.
“It was held together with chicken wire and chewing gum. Infrastructure such
as power stations were only operating with a complete hotchpotch of spare
parts brought in over the years from various countries around the world
during the years of sanctions. In hospitals, whatever equipment they had was
old and there wasn’t much of it; open sewers ran through the main hospital
in Basra.”
Within days he could sense that the momentum had already begun to slip away.
Buildings were being set on fire and insurgents had started to emerge.
When General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the British Army, came to Baghdad,
Cross briefed him. The presentation he gave was entitled: Snatching Defeat
from the Jaws of Victory.
Jackson asked Cross: “How are we making a difference?”
Cross answered: “We’re not.” Cross told Jackson that Garner’s team was too
small. It did not have adequate communications, being dependent on
unreliable satellite phones that were often useless. Team members lived in
an abandoned palace with no hot water, eating ready-made meals. Because
Garner’s team could not get adequate protection, it struggled to leave the
green zone and so was isolated. Daily life turned out to be a struggle for
survival.
Within days of Garner’s arrival in Baghdad he seemed out of his depth – his
lack of authority brutally exposed. It was announced that Paul Bremer would
replace him with the new title of head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority. According to Cross, the Bush administration had realised its
catastrophic mistake and “unfairly” hung Garner out to dry.
Crucially, Bremer came to Baghdad with the authority of the president, which
Garner had never had. Cross and others briefed him about the situation that
he would be inheriting. But Bremer then turned everything on its head,
implementing his three pillars – to disband the army, to begin
deBa’athification and to slow down the political process.
“By the time he arrived it was already too late,” concluded Cross. “No matter
what he attempted to do he would have struggled, but with those three
decisions he virtually threw away any chance of short to medium term
success.”
There was one early success, however. Cross initially found the oil ministry
building empty and ripped apart; but within a short time, and with little
fanfare, the ministry was handed over to be run by a senior Iraqi.
From Cross’s point of view the Americans seemed no more interested in the oil
ministry than education or health or any other department: “In all the
debates in Washington or Kuwait, I never heard anyone talking about oil as
the key issue. It would be idle to suggest it wasn’t a factor, but to be
fair to the Americans all I ever heard being discussed was that we would get
the oil facilities up and running and once we did that the oil would flow
and bring revenue to Iraq. Then Iraq could rebuild itself.
“I never sensed any overt desire to hold on to or control the oil ministry any
more than any other.”
Almost as proof of this, Gordon Brown, as chancellor, had barely set aside any
funds towards the country’s rebuilding. Basra, with its southern oil-fields,
was in the UK’s area of responsibility and had a crumbling infrastructure in
need of investment. The international development department allocated £154m
in April 2003 and a further £60m was announced in the spring budget: just
£210m for reconstruction and humanitarian work.
On October 30, 2003, Straw said the government planned to spend £544m on the
reconstruction of Iraq during the three-year period commencing April 2003.
Cross’s view, then and now, was that it was never going to be enough and
that the critical moments had passed.
Cross still feels, however, that the purpose of the invasion was valid. “I
have no embarrassment about affirming that the overall intent of wanting to
see a free, democratic Iraq was not a bad vision. Blair had talked about
moral imperatives and conditional sovereignty and I believe he was right,”
he said.
Nor does he believe that this is the time for Britain to “abandon ship”. He
thinks the UK military strategy now being promoted is correct but that does
not tell the whole story.
“While the UK has inevitably made the decision to reduce its military
commitment, it will rightly continue to support the Iraq security forces in
many ways. But we do need to continue to invest in other nonmilitary
capabilities,” he said.
“While the oil industry obviously needs help to get it up and running, we also
need to help the Iraqis establish the various organs of their democracy. The
different factions in the insurgency have started to talk to one another and
there are some reasons for hope; but if that hope is to be fulfilled they
will need our help, not our withdrawal.”
He is critical of the media, which continue to insist that everything is a
disaster and Britain should pull out: “Media pressure has not been helpful.
They demand easy answers and quick solutions when there are none and can’t
be. This has always been a situation that was going to have long-term
implications and long-term commitment. The UK must learn the lessons and
hold its nerve.”
Cross fears that we still have not learnt our lesson: “Gordon Brown’s recent
allocation of just £30m towards continuing reconstruction in Basra doesn’t
send much of a reassuring message. We still need answers to questions about
whether the government is putting in sufficient resources and talent, both
military and nonmilitary.”
Cross does not think we are. “There is still no coherent national campaign
plan for the so-called global war on terror which is, after all, where this
all started,” he said, “nor seemingly sufficient resources overall to have
any real effect.”
