The Foreign Service Journal, May 2007

n the summer of 2004, the Butler Review, the official British inquiry into the intelligence fail- ures surrounding the invasion of Iraq, received written testimony from an unlikely source: a senior British Foreign Service officer who was a former first secretary in the United King- dom’s mission to the United Nations. Carne Ross, who was London’s point man on Iraq issues at the U.N. from 1997 to 2002, submitted a forthright critique of the Blair government’s Iraq policy, asserting that the intelli- gence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been grossly exaggerated and questioning the legal basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Soon afterward, Ross, a rising star in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, tendered his resignation, and established a nonprofit organization called Independent Diplomat (www.independentdiplomat.com ). Instead of implementing policy based on politicians’ interpretations of national interest, Ross provides diplomatic advice to “those who need it most: the disadvantaged, politically oppressed and economically marginalized.” In less than three years, Ross has built a roster of clients that includes the Kosovo and Somaliland governments. Last month Ross published a book, Independent Diplo- mat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite (Cornell Uni- versity Press), asserting that “the institutions of contempo- rary diplomacy — foreign ministries, the U.N., the E.U. and the like — often exclude those they most affect.” Speaking in a March 24 interview with the Foreign Service Journal , Ross argued that nation-states’ narrowly defined interests often overwhelm and exclude more complex, sophisticated ways of understanding, and that “to cope with the complexities of today’s world, diplomats must open their doors — and minds — to a far wider range of individ- uals and groups, concerns and ideas, than the current and increasingly dysfunctional system allows.” Ross joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1989, entering the “fast stream” of the British diplomatic corps. Before his five-year posting to New York, Ross served in Germany and Norway. He also held a number of presti- gious posts in London, including the position of speech- writer to the Foreign Secretary at that time, Malcolm Rifkind. In 1997, Ross was assigned to the U.K. mission to the U.N., where he was primarily responsible for matters con- T HE E DUCATION OF C ARNE R OSS : F ROM O UTRAGE TO O PPORTUNITY A SENIOR B RITISH F OREIGN S ERVICE OFFICER WHO RESIGNED THREE YEARS AGO OVER HIS GOVERNMENT ’ S I RAQ POLICY NOW PROVIDES DIPLOMATIC ADVICE TO THOSE WHO NEED IT MOST . I B Y L UDOVIC H OOD Ludovic Hood is a new Foreign Service officer, slated to join Embassy Kuwait later this year. He previously served with the United Nations in East Timor and New York, and taught a course on post-conflict democratization at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 2006. The views in this article are those of the author and/or the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of State or the U.S. government. 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 7