Yesterday evening I chaired a meeting at Chatham House with Carne Ross – a former British diplomat and “whistleblower”. Ross was in charge of the Iraq dossier in Britain’s UN delegation in the run-up to the Iraq war. It was his job to prepare the evidence on “weapons of mass destruction” and to negotiate resolutions on sanctions. But the more he worked on the issue, the more “exhausted and troubled” he found himself. In mid-2002 – about nine months before the outbreak of war – he took a sabbatical from the diplomatic service.

But, as he watched the move to war, his deep knowledge of the WMD issue convinced him that Washington and London were engaged in a “gross exaggeration of what we knew” and that “Britain’s behaviour in the Security Council was at best manipulative and at worst dishonest.” In a fascinating new book, “Independent Diplomat” (Hurst), Ross writes that – “I drafted many resignation letters but did not send them.” But the suicide of David Kelly – a British weapons-inspector and a colleague and friend of Ross’s - “appalled and enraged me.” In the summer of 2004 Ross gave scathing testimony to Britain’s “Butler Inquiry” into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD. This evidence was, in effect, his letter of resignation.

Meeting Ross last night, I could see why he was regarded as a “high-flyer” at the Foreign Office. He still has the easy charm and confidence of the successful diplomat. I liked the way he refused to embrace the term “whistleblower” or to indulge in crowd-pleasing bashing of Tony Blair. Despite his profound disagreements with British government policy, he was prepared to credit Blair with good intentions and moral seriousness. His book is also much more interesting than the average diplomat’s memoir, because it goes well beyond the usual accounts of negotiations and shifting positions, and gives an insightful account of the psychology of the people making policy.

And yet I must admit I was disappointed by the critique of international diplomacy that Ross presented at Chatham House last night. It struck me as utopian, incoherent and over-laden with philosophical ideas that obscured the issues, rather than illuminating them.

Ross made a great many points. But the most important ones seemed to me to be that international diplomats are an unaccountable elite; that they often pretend to know far more than they do; that they present an over-simplified and reductionist view of the world (he calls it “essentialist”); that the idea of national interest is increasingly anachronistic and should be replaced by an emphasis on universal values. And – most important of all – that international diplomacy needs to be “opened up”. A closed system should be fragmented, so that more points-of-view are represented and the “unaccountable elite” are forced to engage with the real world.

Now, there are elements of truth in almost all of these ideas. But I’m not sure where they lead you. For example, I can understand Ross’s anguish that the real interests and suffering of the Iraqi people were ignored in the sanctions debates, which he helped to shape. But who exactly could have represented the authentic voice of Iraq? Given that Iraq was a dictatorship, the spokesmen would have been likely to be hand-picked representatives of Saddam or the much-abused “exiles” – neither of whom were exactly neutral in the argument.

Similarly to argue for a more democratic foreign policy and a more universalist foreign policy simultaneously raises more questions than it answers. Ross feels the west should have done a lot more to help the oppressed peoples of western Sahara and is ashamed of a memo he wrote saying that Britain “had no dog in this fight”. But my guess is that this would be pretty close to the position of most British voters. A universalist foreign policy would argue for helping the Sahawaris; a democratic foreign policy would argue against.

I admired and liked Carne Ross. He is a “do-gooder” in the best sense of the word. But I’m not sure a world run along Rossite lines would be any safer or more just.

March 1st, 2007 in Uncategorised | Permalink