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One News Page Alert: US 'did not believe Britain would refuse to send..

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US 'did not believe Britain would refuse to send forces to Iraq'
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Former defence chief tells Iraq inquiry that US generals believed
Britain would commit troops even if there were no attempts to solve
the crisis through the UNThe US believed that Britain would take an
active part in the Iraq war even if there were no attempts to solve
the crisis through the UN, the inquiry into the conflict heard
today.During the first evidence so far from senior military and
defence ministry figures, Admiral Lord Boyce, the chief of the defence
staff from 2001 to 2003, told the inquiry panel that US generals and
the country's then-defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, seemingly
refused to countenance the possibility that Britain would not commit
troops.No matter how many times you said to senior American officers,
and indeed Mr Rumsfeld, that we were not committing our forces until
we had been through the proper UN process, and had been through
parliament as well, there was a complete reluctance to believe that,
Boyce told the panel, chaired by former senior civil servant Sir John
Chilcot.It was a case of, 'Yeah, I know you've got to say that, but
come the day you'll be there.' [That] was the attitude.Boyce also said
that he and other top British military officers found it very
frustrating that they could not carry out logistical plans for an
apparently imminent war because the government feared such
preparations would make the public assume a conflict was
inevitable.Boyce said he had not been permitted to make purchases or
carry out other practical planning for deployment to Iraq before
November 2002, just four months before British troops joined the
invasion.The then-defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, had made this
decision as he did not wish news of such concrete planning to leak out
while the government was still officially committed to solving the
dispute via the United Nations.Boyce said: It was very frustrating. I
was not allowed to do that. In other words, having refined our
theoretical strategic planning, I could not take the next step, which
was to implement it and to start doing the necessary purchasing and
bringing things forward, getting people in the right sort of
place.This was all very much, as I said earlier on, in order not to
make any signals that we were doing overt military planning while the
UN negotiations were going on, leading up to the resolution that
happened in November.In the meantime, Boyce added, all he could carry
out was high-level planning.Also giving evidence this morning was Sir
Kevin Tebbit, who as permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence
from 1998 to 2005 was the ministry's top civil servant at the time of
the invasion.Asked about funding for the military operation, Tebbit
said that while there was not enough money for the MoD as a whole,
Gordon Brown, then still the chancellor, did provide sufficient funds
for the war.At no stage did the chancellor of the exchequer withhold
the funds [needed to carry out the operation], he said. The problem
was a more basic one about the defence budget as a whole. It was just
that the defence budget was too small.Tebbit Ã¢Â€Â" who labelled the
accusation that the war was carried out due to oil completely untrue
Ã¢Â€Â" said Britain's generals had never actively sought a role in Iraq,
telling the panel: At no stage, frankly, did I feel that there was an
effort by the military establishment to drive the agenda. Whether that
was the case in the United States, I cannot say.But he noted that it
was recognised that in taking part in the invasion, the UK would have
far more of a say over what happened in Iraq, a lesson learned from
the first Iraq conflict in 1991.Unless and until one had boots on the
ground, one did not have serious influence on America, he said.