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.

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