The Iraq War (31 page)

By the time of Dr Kelly’s appearance before the FAC, confirmation of his name as Gilligan’s ‘official’ had been made public, through a curious guessing game devised by the Ministry of Defence, which declined to publish his name but agreed to confirm it if it was put to the Ministry by a newspaper or broadcasting agency.
The Financial Times
was the first organization to make the correct guess.

As soon as publicly identified, Dr Kelly left his house in Oxfordshire with his wife for the west of England, to take refuge from press attention. He later returned to his daughter’s house in Oxford and it was from her home that he travelled to London on 15 and 16 July to attend the meetings of the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence and Security Committees. He then returned to his own house where he joined his wife. They spent the morning of 17 July together though for most of the time he was working in his study. Colleagues at the Ministry of Defence sent him a number of e-mails about the progress of the inquiry and he sent e-mails himself and made and received telephone calls. He and his wife then had lunch together. She found his state distressed. He was sunk in silence. After lunch he said he would go for a walk and, after returning briefly to his study, he set out. He did
not return. As the evening drew out his family became concerned and his daughters searched for him. After midnight they called the police. Early next morning, after the organization of a police search, his body was found in remote woodland. Its state suggested he had committed suicide, by cutting his wrist and taking an overdose of painkillers. The official inquiry later conducted by Lord Hutton into the circumstances of his death confirmed that to be the case.

The death of Dr Kelly provoked a full-blooded political crisis in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister immediately announced, the day following Dr Kelly’s death, that an inquiry would be held into the circumstances, to be conducted by Lord Hutton, a senior Law Lord. It first met on 11 August and concluded its work on 25 September. It exercised wide powers. Among the witnesses called were the Prime Minister himself, the Secretary of State for Defence, the Chairman of the Governors of the BBC and its Director-General.

Lord Hutton’s report, published on 28 January 2004, caused consternation. Opponents of the war had expected that the judge would find, in his analysis of the documents brought in evidence, grounds for criticizing the government’s decision to go to war; the report included, among much other material, the ‘September dossier’ which Andrew Gilligan, in his broadcast of 29 May, alleged had been ‘sexed up’ to improve the government’s case. Against the expectations of much of the media, the Conservative opposition in Parliament and many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Lord Hutton decided, by contrast, to reserve almost all his criticism for the BBC. He found that Gilligan’s allegation, that the government’s warning of Iraq’s ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within ‘forty-five minutes’ of receiving the order to do so was based on information it knew to be false, was ‘unfounded’, and that it was inserted at a late stage into the dossier not because its veracity was doubted by intelligence officers but because of its late reception. He also dismissed the allegation that the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had yielded to pressure applied by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s
Director of Communications, to insert material that supported the government’s case for war which was not supported by intelligence evidence. He recognized that the JIC Chairman, John Scarlett, had been willing to assist the government but only in so far as the facts did so as well.

Turning to the BBC, he was almost unsparing in his strictures. He found Gilligan’s allegations about the ‘forty-five minute’ claim and the circumstances of its insertion to be unfounded. He found the BBC’s system of exercising editorial control to be ‘defective’, as was its procedure for investigating complaints. He criticized the Governors of the BBC for failing properly to investigate the complaint against the Gilligan broadcast and so for persisting in a failure to apologize for which a proper investigation would have shown the necessity.

The government did not altogether escape Lord Hutton’s criticisms. Those focused on the pathetic circumstances of Dr David Kelly’s death. David Kelly was a distinguished scientist who had spent a life of duty in the scientific civil service. Scientific civil servants occupy an ill-defined and anomalous position, superior to that of middle-rank penpushers but inferior, and made to feel inferior, to the Whitehall grandees who mingle on terms of equality with ministers, despite the fact that they can be of an intellectual eminence not found elsewhere in government service. Like all government servants they are forbidden to speak in any undirected way to the media. Some, however, and David Kelly was one, are given a loose and undefined permission to brief the media on matters of public interest. They are thus put in an indefensible position, apparently allowed to speak to journalists but liable to disciplinary action if what they say causes embarrassment. Poor David Kelly fell headfirst into that trap.

Lord Hutton conceded that Dr Kelly, when the trouble broke, was given support by a few of his immediate civil service superiors. The hierarchy effectively disowned him. Sir Kevin Tebbits, the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, described Dr Kelly in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘a relatively junior official’ and ‘not the Government’s principal adviser on the subject
[of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction], nor even a senior one’. Yet Dr Kelly knew more about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than anyone in Britain. It is testimony to how little real experts are valued within the government hierarchy that he could be discussed so dismissively. Lord Hutton was moved by compassion. At the end of his report he adopted as his conclusion on the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death the opinion of the Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University who had examined the evidence. He judged that Dr Kelly had killed himself out of a ‘profound sense of hopelessness’, of his life’s work having been ‘not wasted but … totally undermined’; these feelings were compounded by fear that the civil service intended to take disciplinary action against him, perhaps end his work in Iraq or even dismiss him from government employment.

David Kelly was not the only victim of the ‘September dossier’ affair. The Chairman of the Governors of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, resigned on the day of the Hutton report’s publication. Greg Dyke, the Director-General, resigned a day later. No such indignities had ever before been visited upon an institution which continued to regard itself, with some justification, as ‘the greatest news-gathering institution in the world’. A little later, in the first week of February 2004, the British government announced that it would undertake an inquiry into the workings of the intelligence services over the Iraq crisis. Its announcement followed one similar by the United States government.

Thus the certainties that had inaugurated the brief and brilliant campaign to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein petered out in recrimination. Objectively the world was undoubtedly a safer place as the result of his downfall, besides being morally purged of one of the most wicked dictators of modern times. Subjectively it was even more divided than it had been when the ‘war on terror’ was undertaken after the atrocity of 11 September 2001. The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. ‘Europe’, the Europe
of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states are ordered.

Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H. W. Bush’s proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world’s future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warnings uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book – Iran, North Korea – was found by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March–April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.

ROYAL NAVY AND ROYAL MARINES

HMS
Ark Royal
(aircraft carrier)

HMS
Ocean
(helicopter carrier)

HMS
Liverpool
(Type 42 destroyer)

HMS
Edinburgh
(Type 42 destroyer)

HMS
York
(Type 42 destroyer)

HMS
Marlborough
(Type 23 frigate)

HMS
Richmond
(Type 23 frigate)

HMS
Grimsby
(minehunter)

HMS
Ledbury
(minehunter)

HMS
Brocklesby
(minehunter)

HMS
Blyth
(minehunter)

HMS
Chatham
(Type 22 frigate)

HMS
Splendid
(Swiftsure class submarine)

HMS
Turbulent
(Trafalgar class submarine)

RFA
Argus

RFA (Royal Fleet Auxiliary)
Sir Tristram

RFA
Sir Galahad

RFA
Sir Percivale

RFA
Fort Victoria

RFA
Fort Rosalie

RFA
Fort Austin

RFA
Orangeleaf

The amphibious force

Numbered some 4,000 and included:

HQ 3 Commando Brigade

40 Commando Royal Marines

42 Commando Royal Marines

29 Regt, Royal Artillery (105mm Light Gun)

539 Assault Sqn, RM

59 Commando Sqn, RE

Helicopter air groups
aboard
Ark Royal
and
Ocean
included:
845, 846, 847, 849 Sqns

ARMY

1 (UK) Armoured Division:

Headquarters and 1 Armoured Division Signal Regt

30 Signal Regt (strategic communications)

The Queen’s Dragoon Guards (reconnaissance)

1st Bn The Duke of Wellington’s Regt (additional infantry capability) 28 Engineer Regt

1 General Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

2 Close Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

2nd Bn, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers

1 Close Support Medical Regt

5 General Support Medical Regt

1 Regt, Royal Military Police

plus elements from various units including:

33 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regt

30 Signal Regt

32 Regt Royal Artillery

(Phoenix UAVs)

7th Armoured Brigade

Headquarters and Signal Sqn

Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (Challenger 2 tanks)

2nd Royal Tank Regt (Challenger 2 tanks)

1st Bn The Black Watch (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)

1st Bn Royal Regt of Fusiliers (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)

3rd Regt Royal Horse Artillery (AS 90 self-propelled guns)

32 Armoured Engineer Regt

plus elements from various units including:

Queens Royal Lancers (Challenger 2 tanks)

1st Bn Irish Guards (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)

1st Bn The Light Infantry (Warrior infantry fighting vehicles)

26 Regt Royal Artillery

38 Engineer Regt

16 Air Assault Brigade

Headquarters and Signal Sqn

1st Bn The Royal Irish Regt

1st Bn The Parachute Regt

3rd Bn The Parachute Regt

7 (Para) Regt Royal Horse Artillery (105mm Light Guns)

23 Engineer Regt

D Sqn, Household Cavalry Regt

3 Regt Army Air Corps (Lynx & Gazelle helicopters)

7 Air Assault Bn, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers

13 Air Assault Support Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

16 Close Support Medical Regt

156 Provost Company RMP

102 Logistics Brigade

Headquarters 2 Signal Regt

36 Engineer Regt

33 and 34 Field Hospitals

202 Field Hospital (Volunteer)

4 General Support Medical Regt

3 Bn, Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers

6 Supply Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

7 Transport Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

17 Port & Maritime Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

23 Pioneer Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

24 Regt, Royal Logistic Corps

5 Regt, Royal Military Police

Specialist Royal Engineer teams

Airfield engineer support units from 12 Engineer Brigade

Elements from 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regt

Elements from additional Royal Logistic Corps Regts

ROYAL AIR FORCE

Composite sqns formed including elements from:

9, 13, 31, 39 (1 PRU) Sqns, RAF Marham

12, 14, 617 Sqns, RAF Lossiemouth

11, 25 Sqns, RAF Leeming

43, 111 Sqns, RAF Leuchars

6, 41, 54 Sqns, RAF Coltishall

1, 3, IV Sqns, RAF Cottesmore

8, 23, 51 Sqns, RAF Waddington

33 Sqn, RAF Benson

10, 99, 101, 216 Sqns, RAF Brize Norton

24, 30, 47, 70 Sqns, RAF Lyneham

120, 201, 206 Sqns, RAF Kinloss

7, 18, 27 Sqns, RAF Odiham

RAF Regt

NAVY

HMAS
Kanimbla

HMAS
Anzac

HMAS
Darwin

AIR FORCE

One RAAF sqn F/A-18

Three RAAF C-130

Two P-3C Orion

ARMY