Mother Jones has an interesting interview with a one-time British diplomat who sheds a rare insight into diplomatic "issues" leading up to the Iraq War:
"An unlikely revolutionary, Carne Ross was once a rising star in the British Foreign Office (the equivalent of the U.S. State Department), where, among other postings, he worked as a speechwriter for the Foreign Secretary and later as the Middle East expert assigned to the U.K.'s delegation to the U.N. Security Council. It was during his time at the U.N. that he became disillusioned with the current state of diplomacy, an experience that forms the basis for his recent book, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, Ross was in the unique position to see the official intelligence about Iraq's supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. What he learned was disturbing: there was no concrete evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons programs. This fact, however, did not seem to figure into the policy-making decisions that made the U.S.-led invasion all but inevitable. In 2004, Ross testified as much to the Butler Inquiry, a British parliamentary investigation into the misuse of pre-war intelligence. His comments were not well received by the British government, which invoked the U.K.'s Official Secrets Act to suppress the transcript of his testimony. Ross resigned from the Foreign Office in 2004 and went on to found Independent Diplomat, the world's first private diplomatic organization, which instructs representatives from underserved and underrepresented countries in how to make their voices heard."
Mother Jones spoke with Ross on July 19 - which can be read here.
"An unlikely revolutionary, Carne Ross was once a rising star in the British Foreign Office (the equivalent of the U.S. State Department), where, among other postings, he worked as a speechwriter for the Foreign Secretary and later as the Middle East expert assigned to the U.K.'s delegation to the U.N. Security Council. It was during his time at the U.N. that he became disillusioned with the current state of diplomacy, an experience that forms the basis for his recent book, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, Ross was in the unique position to see the official intelligence about Iraq's supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. What he learned was disturbing: there was no concrete evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons programs. This fact, however, did not seem to figure into the policy-making decisions that made the U.S.-led invasion all but inevitable. In 2004, Ross testified as much to the Butler Inquiry, a British parliamentary investigation into the misuse of pre-war intelligence. His comments were not well received by the British government, which invoked the U.K.'s Official Secrets Act to suppress the transcript of his testimony. Ross resigned from the Foreign Office in 2004 and went on to found Independent Diplomat, the world's first private diplomatic organization, which instructs representatives from underserved and underrepresented countries in how to make their voices heard."
Mother Jones spoke with Ross on July 19 - which can be read here.
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