For all its destructive magnitude and historical significance, the US invasion of Iraq has prompted remarkably little commemoration in advance of its twentieth anniversary. It’s as if the world just wants to forget an episode whose senselessness makes it difficult to extract any meaning at all.

But for anyone who does want to understand the war and its consequences, there are few more knowledgable guides than Glen Rangwala, associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge.

A specialist in Arab politics and international relations, Rangwala was a founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq in the 1990s and gained perhaps his greatest notoriety during the run-up to the war, when he exposed what became known as the “dodgy dossier” — Tony Blair’s publicly released compendium of alleged evidence concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which was supposed to justify an invasion — as a largely plagiarized fraud.