Examination of Witnesses (Questions 24-39)
MR CARNE
ROSS
8 NOVEMBER 2006
Q24 Chairman: Mr Ross, thank you
for coming today. I am sorry that we kept you waiting for a few
minutes, but unfortunately we started a few minutes late. I must
warn you that we are in a strange situation today. The House is
proroguing, and the Committee is not allowed to continue after
the House is prorogued. Therefore, we have about 34 minutes, I
hope. Hopefully we will get through as much as possible, but the
rules of the House are clear. Sadly, it is one of those odd days
that only occur once a year. I welcome you. You have sent us a
very helpful paper that sets out quite robustly your views on
a number of issues. I do not want to refer to it directly, but
perhaps you could give us your overall view of the active diplomacy
document. Do you believe that it is helpful to the work of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office for it to publish such documents?
Mr Ross: First, thank you for
having me. I am glad to be here. My views on the paper are pretty
clear from my evidence. I do not think that it is helpful. I think
that it is a kind of smokescreen in front of the reality of British
foreign policy. It talks in such general terms about that foreign
policy that it is not actually provocative of a useful or constructive
debate. It does not even refer in detail, for instance, to the
fact that Britain is in military occupation of two foreign countries
right now. I take that just as an example, but you have already
touched in your discussion this morning on other rather odd omissions,
including much of our policy in the Middle East, including toward
Israel and Palestine.
Q25 Mr Keetch: Just for the record,
as Mr Ross is known to me, I have checked with both the Clerk
and the Chairman and can continue to ask him questions. Mr Ross,
you say in your statement that the FCO pays little attention to
Parliament and that UK policy making is done in a closed box,
yet you have just heard your former boss, Sir Jeremy Greenstock,
say that he always took the recommendations and reports of this
Committee very seriously. Do you believe that the Foreign Office
listens to the results of parliamentary scrutiny? Do you think
that there is a role for Parliament in that, or are the mandarins
so enclosed that they take very little or even no notice of what
we or other parliamentarians might believe?
Mr Ross: I think that the latter
is true. Certainly in my career, which covered many quite central
and grave issues of British foreign policy, parliamentary scrutiny
and the role of the Foreign Affairs Committee made no intrusion
whatever on my work. I am surprised that Sir Jeremy said what
he said; I worked with him very closely in New York for four years.
I have to say that there, in my work on Iraq and the Middle East
more generally, the Foreign Affairs Committee, again, played no
significant role in our existences. Policy on Iraq was made by
a very small group of officials who submitted a very narrow range
of choices to Ministers. Ministers were, of course, more worried
about Parliament, but for the officials the role of Parliament
and what Parliament or this Committee said about our policy was,
at best, insignificant. To give you a specific example, I worked
very closely on sanctions against Iraq. I negotiated many of the
resolutions on Iraq over my period at the UK mission. That was
a complex and important piece of policy and that policy was, I
think, in the final analysis, misguided and incorrect in its premises
and its direction. I had never had any experience of any MP or
any Committee scrutinising my work—at least, the Department
in London never told me of any such scrutiny. I can give you that
as a specific example.
Q26 Mr Keetch: So you believe that
all people at the Foreign Office should be open to the kind of
scrutiny that we give senior members? You believe that that scrutiny
should be opened up to the more junior echelons of the Foreign
Office?
Mr Ross: Yes, I do. I think that
senior members are extremely adept at giving the sort of spiel
and bromidic answers about British foreign policy that to an extent
you heard this morning. This document, "Active Diplomacy
for a Changing World", is full of such statements. You need
to talk about policy in detail. This paper is pitched at such
a level of generality that it is impossible to take from it any
specific discussion about what is important and what is going
on in British foreign policy. I certainly think that you need
to be interrogating all officials in the Foreign Office who have
a role in policy making, and that includes mid-level and junior-level
people as well. They are part of the pyramid of filtering of information
up to Ministers. Ministers deal with things at such a level of
generality that they are often unaware of crucial details of policy.
Q27 Andrew Mackinlay: Your paragraphs
9, 11 and 12 are a devastating criticism of whether or not we
scrutinise, and also of the response that one gets from the Foreign
Office to any parliamentary questions, debates or scrutiny, either
collectively by Parliament or by individual MPs. Do you have any
examples of when there has been an attempt to minimise disclosure,
either to an MP or to a parliamentary Committee, following parliamentary
questions—strategy meetings to deal with difficult parliamentary
questions or anything like that?
Mr Ross: As I say, parliamentary
scrutiny played such a small role in my career as an official
that I do not recall any such strategy meetings or a concerted
attempt to minimise disclosure. However, I was closely involved
in Iraq policy for many years in the British Government. This
is my first appearance before this Committee. I have never been
asked to testify to any other Committee, despite the fact that
I was a central part of the drafting of the premises of British
policy in the UN Security Council. I take that as an example of
that absence of scrutiny. I have to say that the Committee's scrutiny
of the Iraq war—what led up to it, the legality of it, the
decision making prior to it, the possible alternatives to war—to
me stands as an example of that failure.
Q28 Andrew Mackinlay: I am obliged.
In paragraph 12, you allege that "promotion to senior positions
has been in part based on the political sympathies of officials.
Those closely associated with Number Ten, and who are seen to
be sympathetic to the Prime Minister's prejudices, are swept up
into senior positions." You also say that another consequence
of recent developments is that "officials increasingly tell
ministers what they wish to hear. The culture of official impartiality,
and the ability of officials to tell ministers necessary truths,
is undermined." Would you like to amplify on that?
Mr Ross: It is difficult to amplify
on it, because I am not prepared to name the people about whom
I am talking. That would not be fair. Nor would it be fair to
indulge in ad hominem criticism of particular individuals when
they are in no position to respond. The trend is a general one
that I and others have observed. I have checked that with my former
colleagues from the FCO and with current friends who are serving
in the FCO, and they have confirmed it in both aspects. The first
aspect is that there is a subtle and creeping politicisation of
the diplomatic service, whereby in order to get promoted one has
to show oneself as being sympathetic to, and identifying with,
the views of Ministers—in particular the Prime Minister.
The second aspect was true under the Conservative Government as
well, before Labour took office. Decision-making powers have become
increasingly concentrated in No 10 rather than the Foreign Office,
and the Foreign Office has become subsidiary to No 10. That means
that if you want to get ahead there is nothing better than a posting
to No. 10, as officials currently serving in the Foreign Office
will confirm.
Q29 Andrew Mackinlay: The impression
I have from the Foreign Office is that there are still ins and
outs: some people who find favour, almost like a magic circle
for promotion. We know that a large number of distinguished and
experienced people have "retired early," at a reasonable
price, as it were. It seems to me that that is not a good use
of scarce and skilled resources, and that talent is being lost.
We pay people to go, and others stay because their faces fit.
I cannot describe it in any other way. I want to bounce that off
you. What say you about it?
Mr Ross: I think that that is
true. There is a political element at work in promotion to the
most senior levels of the Foreign Office, which is wasteful of
resources. More seriously, it means that all through the Foreign
Office there is a tendency to tell Ministers what they wish to
hear in order to advance one's own individual prospects—my
former colleagues tell me that that is the case today. It is a
subtle thing, and I am sure that the Foreign Office would be vehement
in its rebuttal of the accusation, but I noticed it. I noticed
it before I resigned, and I think that it is a waste of resources
that skilled and highly trained people leave early because of
it.
Q30 Mr Horam: My point follows Andrew
Mackinlay's question about paragraph 12 of your interesting document.
In paragraph 13, in the conclusions and recommendations, you say,
"The last few years have been disastrous for British foreign
policy". What in particular is the disaster, and why has
that been so?
Mr Ross: I think that things like
influence, and Britain's role in the world, are very hard to quantify
and easy to debate. In my view, the measure of success or failure
in foreign policy should be Karl Popper's, which is the minimisation
of suffering. That should be the goal of policy. If that is the
measure, our policy has been a rank disaster in the last few years
in terms of blood shed. I do not want to enter the debate on how
many lives may have been lost in the invasion of Iraq, but it
is a great many. By that measure, that invasion has been a much
greater disaster even than Suez.
Q31 Mr Horam: Do you think that the
policy would have been any more successful if the Foreign Office
had been more influential? I put it to Sir Jeremy Greenstock and
others that policy in the last few years has been more or less
run by No 10 Downing street, not the Foreign Office; the Foreign
Office has been merely a servant. If the Foreign Office had more
influence in making foreign policy, would we perhaps have avoided
some of those mistakes, such as Iraq?
Mr Ross: I think that the Foreign
Office would like the world to think that, and to think that if
only the Foreign Office had been taken more seriously we would
not be in this mess. I am not sure that that is the case. At the
end of the day, the Prime Minister is in charge of British Government
policy, and as a former official I accept that. That is nothing
but right and it is the role of the Foreign Office to serve him.
However, policy making in the run-up to the Iraq war was extremely
poor, in that available alternatives to war were not properly
considered, the presentation to the public of the intelligence
on weapons of mass destruction was manipulated, and proper legal
advice from the Foreign Office on the legality of the war was
ignored.
Q32 Mr Horam: Finally, on the success
or failure of British foreign policy, you state, "We are
so inured to the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and macho posturing...
that it is hard to imagine an alternate direction for British
foreign policy. But it is available ...This alternative lies in
consistency of application of international law and a robust defence...
of those under assault or oppression." I am particularly
interested to know what you mean by consistency of application
of international law. What are you getting at? Could you perhaps
elaborate on that a bit?
Mr Ross: The easiest place to
observe it is in the middle east, where the accusation of double
standards against British foreign policy has some weight. If you
say that you stand by international law, which Active Diplomacy
repeatedly does, you must apply it consistently across the board,
and that means talking about it in the case of Israel-Palestine.
It was very noticeable to me, as a former head of section dealing
with the Arab-Israel dispute on what used to be called the Middle
East peace process desk, that, in the incarnations when I worked
there, the Government consistently talked about UN resolutions
242 and 338 and the discourse of occupation as the premise for
British foreign policy. That is no longer the case. British Ministers
rarely refer to international law when talking about Palestine.
Instead, there is a sort of hand-wringing campaign in an effort
to bring peace, as if we are talking about two equal parties in
the dispute when in fact we are talking about one country occupying
the territory of another people.
Q33 Chairman: May I ask you a question
about something that is not in your paper? You served in the Balkans,
and in fact I believe that we met in that region a few years ago
when I was on the Defence Committee. You do not seem to have many
criticisms of the Foreign Office's approach to the Balkans and
Kosovo. Do you have any?
Mr Ross: No. In fact, in a sentence
at the end of my paper, I approve of the British Government policy
in Kosovo. I think that they are playing a constructive role there
in pushing for an early and positive solution to the issue of
Kosovo's status. Since the debacle of British inaction over genocide
in Bosnia, the British Government have actually been a constructive
force in the Balkans. It certainly seemed that way when I was
there.
Q34 Chairman: So I take it that your
robust criticism is a bit like the curate's egg: it is good in
parts as well.
Mr Ross: Yes, certainly. I am
not uniform in my criticism of all manifestations of British foreign
policy, but our policy is in deep trouble in all the areas where
we face the gravest problems: things such as terrorism, proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and the nuclear threat posed by
North Korea and Iran.
Q35 Sir John Stanley: Mr Ross, I
believe that you were in the room when Sir Jeremy Greenstock was
giving evidence. I heard him say—we can check the transcript
afterwards—that the UK Government were broadly unified in
their approach to Iraq before the coalition invaded. However,
you said that the senior legal adviser to the Foreign Office resigned
specifically on the issue of the legality of the invasion. Was
it your view at the time that the British Government were broadly
united in their policy on the invasion of Iraq?
Mr Ross: I should preface my answer
by saying that I went on sabbatical from the Foreign Office from
June 2002. I was studying at a university in New York during the
invasion itself. However, I was in close touch with many of my
colleagues who were still at the missions in New York and in London.
They were personal friends, and we had worked together on the
subject for many years. One of the oddities of policy making is
that only a small group of people are involved in any particular
policy, and there were perhaps five or six of us in the Ministry
of Defence and FCO who worked on Iraq and sanctions and weapons
of mass destruction issues in the years preceding the invasion.
From my personal conversations with them at various moments in
this saga, including a long conversation that a group of us had
on the way to David Kelly's funeral, I emphatically believe that
there was no unity among the officials working on Iraq—that
would be an inaccurate way of describing their mood.
Q36 Sir John Stanley: On a question
that I put to Sir Jeremy, should the Foreign Office have been
more prescient in recognising what would happen in Iraq once the
Ba'athist party dictatorship was removed? Should it have recognised
that that would bring out the latent forces in Iraq and produce
the sectarian civil war that is now taking place? Are you aware
of people in the Foreign Office who predicted that that would
happen and that the coalition was wholly unprepared for that eventuality,
or did such things simply pass senior officials by?
Mr Ross: I took part in bilateral
discussions between the State Department and the FCO on Iraq for
more than four years. Those discussions were quarterly and went
through our Iraq policy from alpha to omega. One item that was
repeatedly on the agenda was regime change, which, as you know,
was the stated policy of the US Administration even during the
Clinton years. Whenever that item came up on the agenda, the leader
of our delegation, who was usually the director for the middle
east, would say, with emphasis, "We do not believe that regime
change is a good idea in Iraq and the reason we do not believe
that is that we think that Iraq will break up and there will be
chaos." That view would have been recorded in the telegrams
that people such as me wrote to record those discussions. Those
telegrams are, of course, secret and will remain so for many years,
but that was emphatically the unified view of the Foreign Office;
it was not a minority view of one or two officials, but our official
view as put to the US Government on several occasions. That view,
of course, changed in mid-2002.
Q37 Sir John Stanley: Are you saying
that it changed in the light of political imperatives, rather
than in the light of the accuracy of previous official advice?
Mr Ross: There was no basis for
changing the view in terms of what was going on inside Iraq; what
changed, of course, was what our future policy towards Iraq would
be.
Q38 Sir John Stanley: I have just
one last question for you. In your strictures about the Committee,
you say, "The committee's series of reports on the Iraq war
stand as acute evidence of this failure to scrutinise." I
assume that you are not criticising the Committee for its lack
of attention to the issue, given that there is no other subject
to which it has ever given more time or on which it has produced
a greater number of reports. Can you elaborate on why you consider
that the Committee failed to scrutinise the lead-up to the war
in Iraq and the Iraq element of the war on terrorism, if we can
still use that phrase?
Mr Ross: I have surveyed your
reports on the Iraq war and watched very closely as you followed
things such as the dossier, early versions of which I worked on,
and the whole Kelly affair—David Kelly was a friend of mine,
so I was acutely interested in that episode. However, reviewing
the reports that the Committee has produced, I found that you
had not examined the alternatives to war, the policy making in
the run-up to the war or the legality of the war in any great
detail. There seems to be a great focus on particular aspects
of the Iraq issue, including the dossier, which I agree was an
important issue, but it is not the only one. For some reason,
the Committee, Parliament and, indeed, the press have failed to
talk in any detail about the fact that there were available alternatives
to the invasion. Those available policies have not been discussed
by the Committee or, indeed, by many others. I find that surprising.
Q39 Mr Hamilton: Does that mean,
to follow on from what Sir John said, that you detect some sort
of conspiracy and that we deliberately decided that we did not
want to challenge the Government's view that invasion was the
only alternative, or do you think that it is just a matter of
incompetence?
Mr Ross: I would not say that
it is either. I do not know why you did not; it is not for me
to speculate. I am just observing that you did not.
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