Britain’s former foreign secretary Robin Cook has died at the age of 59. He collapsed while walking in the Scottish highlands with his wife. Cook resigned from Tony Blair’s government in March 2003 just before the Iraq invasion. In a speech that generated a rare standing ovation at Parliament, he charged that intelligence on Iraq was being fixed. “I fear the fundamental problem is that instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base the conclusion of a policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which we could justify a policy on which we had already settled,” Cook said. Last week in one of his last interviews Robin Cook said the situation in Iraq was worse than his greatest fears. He said “The violence continues to escalate and part of the reason is that the conduct of US forces has been trigger-happy.”