SENIOR BRITISH officials believed there was no basis under international law for getting rid of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks, the opening day of the Iraq Inquiry was told.
Opening the inquiry’s first day of public hearings, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, said he expected witnesses to give “truthful, fair and accurate” evidence, though the inquiry did not have powers to find anyone guilty: “We are not a court,” he said.
Senior officials, diplomats and military officers will give evidence up to Christmas, followed thereafter by former British prime minister Tony Blair and serving and former government ministers and advisers.
The British had been aware in early 2001 that some senior figures in the then newly installed Bush administration, including then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, were in favour of removing Saddam, Foreign Office officials told the inquiry.
“In February 2001 we were aware of these drum beats from Washington, and internally we discussed it. Our policy was to stay away from that,” senior Foreign Office official Sir William Patey told the inquiry.
A Foreign Office paper was prepared listing available options, from various types of embargo to doing nothing. “I have to say – we had at the end the regime-change option – which was dismissed at the time as having no basis in law,” he said.
Sir Peter Ricketts, now the Foreign Office head, told the inquiry: “We didn’t think that Saddam was a good thing and it would be great if he went, but we didn’t have a policy for getting rid of him.” He said there was concern Saddam was continuing to try to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons.
Washington had not then decided on a fixed policy, and had given the US State Department under Colin Powell time to show that tougher sanctions could force Saddam to accept a weapons inspectors’ investigation.
Mr Powell held this lead role up until 9/11, but then lost influence as the Defence Department under Donald Rumsfeld, who won the ear of President George Bush.
Britain and the US spent months in 2001 trying to toughen sanctions against Iraq, which were by then losing support in the international community and were subject to “sanctions busting” by Russia, the officials said.
Simon Webb, who was then with the Ministry of Defence, said an agreement had been made with the US in early 2001 to limit the numbers of goods covered by sanctions, but to improve inspections to ensure breaches did not occur.
Initially, he said he did not find any British official who supported regime change. “Later, some people were saying we should not entirely exclude it because there was no legal basis,” he told the inquiry.
In March 2001, Mr Webb met American officials in Washington: “The issue of overthrow came up, but I wrote in my notes that ‘the dog did not bark’. I said it grizzled but it did not bark.”
The US view hardened after September 11th: “It shifted to the weapons of mass destruction problem which, in the case of Iraq – in order to deal with the weapons of mass destruction problem – you would probably end up having to push Saddam Hussein out of power,” he said.
The public hearings will continue until February next and then be suspended until after the general election, though a further round of public hearings would then take place involving the recall if necessary of some witnesses.
Relatives of dead British soldiers are unhappy about the inquiry’s offices, complaining that the hearing room – which was not full yesterday – will not be large enough when Mr Blair and other key figures appear before it.