Carne Ross: Our Diplomatic Deficit
Interview: Former British diplomat Carne Ross had an inside view of how international policy is made during the run-up to the Iraq war. He came away believing that the diplomatic system is broken.
July 27, 2007
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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.
Mother Jones: You have written that your critical view of how diplomacy is practiced was formed over time. But was there a moment when it all began to crystallize for you?
Carne Ross: The key experience for me was my time as a British diplomat at the U.N. Security Council in New York. In some ways, that was more important than the Iraq war. What I saw on the Security Council—the way that international law is made and the way that the needs of suffering people are often ignored—was what led to my conclusions about diplomacy. After that job, I took a secondment to the UN mission in Kosovo, partly as a way of testing out the U.N. as a possible future career for me. In June 2004, I testified to a British government inquiry on the use of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It was an experience that crystallized my anxieties over the Iraq War, and shortly afterwards I resigned from the British Foreign Office.
MJ: If you had access to information indicating that claims about Iraq's WMD were not true, why didn't you resign earlier? There were U.S. diplomats who resigned in the run-up to the war. Did it ever cross your mind to do so?
CR: Yes, it did. I drafted many letters of resignation during that period which I didn't send. There were two reasons for this. One was doubt. One of the problems with the Iraq intelligence issue was that there was no official who could claim he knew the absolute totality of the information available. It was not impossible to me that there was new information; in retrospect, this turned out not to be the case. I had also spent many years working against the Saddam government, so I was not totally hostile to the idea of it being removed, including by force. I was ambivalent about the war. But above all, I was afraid of what would happen to me if I were to resign—afraid in terms of my own professional future, but also afraid of the public battering I would doubtless receive. That was probably the most important reason. I'm not proud to confess it, but it's the truth.
MJ: Were there others that you knew or were aware of either at the U.N. or the foreign office who expressed similar feelings, maybe in private conversations you had with them?
CR: Well, I was quite isolated in New York, because I was away from most of my British colleagues in the government who were in London. But I was aware of quite a number of officials who had doubts. I suppose the most important of them was a guy called David Kelly, who was a British weapons scientist who later committed suicide after being outed as the source of a BBC story that the government had exaggerated its account of Iraqi WMD.
MJ: If people in your office had private doubts, but nothing was done at an official level, doesn't that signal that something is amiss?
CR: Well, I think you're right. I think something is seriously amiss. There is nothing more serious than the decision to go to war, and I think both the U.S. and U.K. governments mishandled that decision in a very serious way. There are very, very few people who are qualified to say this, but I'm one of them, because I worked on it. The policy was not straightforward; it was quite complicated and technical. This was one of the reasons why senior officials and executive decision-makers did not address it properly. This is a systematic problem, a systemic problem of policy-making.
MJ: You're suggesting that the complicated nature of modern diplomacy is one of the primary factors contributing to its failure?
CR: Yes. With regard to Iraq policy, the complexity and the long-term and uncertain nature of sanctions enforcement meant that it didn't have the binary clarity of military invasion or not. That may have meant that it got less attention than it deserved as a policy option. I have to say, though, that this is not the only explanation. I think that decision-makers deliberately ignored available alternatives. There was, for whatever reason, a very clear and deliberate decision to go to war come what may.
MJ: When you decided to leave the British government and go into private practice, how did your colleagues react?
CR: It was mixed. Some were hostile, though few to my face. Some commended me for my bravery, though none dared do so in public. Some said to me they would have done the same if they had worked as closely on the issue as I had, in other words making an excuse for themselves that they had not resigned. Many simply patronized me and said they hoped I would survive my unbearable exit from the comforts of the British Foreign Office.
MJ: You've characterized diplomats as an "unaccountable global elite." But you've also accused the rest of us of being irresponsible for ceding power too readily to invisible people working behind the scenes. What do you suggest we do about it?
CR: Perhaps my book is a little too scathing. It is driven by a lot of anger and anxiety about the way things are. But I do think that globally we are far too deferential to diplomats and politicians to make decisions of enormous import on our behalf. I find it staggering that we're not more critical and demanding of scrutiny of these decision-makers. These are decisions about things of the utmost importance, from war to climate change to terrorism to migration, and there is a great tendency to accept the assurances of the diplomatic and political establishments that they have these problems in their grip when I think the evidence suggests that they do not.
MJ: You have gone so far as to recommend that we do away with professional diplomats entirely.
CR: This is something Trotsky would call a transitional demand. You don't realistically expect it to be fulfilled, but in making it you hope to change the system towards fulfillment of that ideal. I don't for one second think that we face the imminent end of the state-based diplomatic system. However, I think that system is deeply, deeply flawed. Above all because it allows this practice called "diplomacy," which is permitted to operate by rules that are amoral and largely free from scrutiny. It's a practice in which small groups of people make enormously important decisions on the basis of fairly arbitrary criteria. I know this from my own experience. This is not an external critique. I as a policymaker on the Middle East and on other issues contributed to decisions about policy that were arbitrary and premised on an invented calculus of what we thought was important. This is not the manner in which policy should be made. There should be much more open participation and democratic accountability.
MJ: You write in your book: "Diplomacy should take a more eclectic approach to information, and allow discussion and examination of emotion and non-measurable elements of reality, or at least acknowledge this deficit in its calculations." What do you mean by that?
CR: The basic idea is that not everything that is important to us can be put into prescriptive, numeric, or empirical terms. Arguably, the most important things cannot be. It is harder to make a decision about a situation when you are far removed from that situation, which is invariably the case with diplomacy. Somehow, we have to account for this deficit when making decisions about other places. One way to address it would be to allow those most affected by a given policy to speak to the decision-makers, which happens all too infrequently. Above all, we have in contemporary culture and politics placed a great reliance on empirical information to convey the quote-unquote "truth" of a situation when no amount of empirical information can convey the whole truth. All description is inevitably reductionist. I suppose it can be easily encapsulated in what happened in our decision-making about sanctions on Iraq. Without doubt, sanctions helped contribute to considerable human suffering in Iraq, and I think had we been more aware of that reality and more conscious of that reality, able to feel that reality, then we as decision-makers drafting resolutions in New York about sanctions in Iraq would have made different decisions. Our decisions were ultimately inhumane because they failed to take full account of the reality of the Iraqi people.
MJ: Another thing you focus on in your book is the language that diplomats use in the course of doing their work. You call it a "reduction of reality." I wonder, though, how does Independent Diplomat deviate from this norm? If you're representing clients within the existing system, don't you have to play by those rules if you want to be heard?
