How A Comma and an Oxford Thesis Started the 2003 Iraq War | Ibrahim Al-Marash | TEDxIEMadrid

How could an Anglo-American with Iraqi origins, pursuing a humanities degree in Oxford, have a global impact on the politics of 2003?

His misplaced comma in an online publication on Iraq led to the discovery that his research had been plagiarized by Alistair Campbell's office in Number 10 Downing Street in the lead up to the Iraq War of 2003.

Afterwards this infamous case of a misplaced comma made it into the last page of Lynne Truss' epic work, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," as a reminder of the importance of punctuation, and a film, “In the Loop,” featured this episode.

The term attributed to his plagiarized paper, "The Dodgy Dossier," has been invoked to refer to the problem of plagiarism in schools, the workplace, and even governments who continue this habit well after the 2003 incident! Doctor Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor at California State University, San Marcos, researching modern Iraqi history. He holds a doctor of philosophy in history from Oxford University (2004), where his thesis was on the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait; a master's degree in political science from Georgetown University, which he had received in 1997; and a bachelor's degree in history and Near Eastern studies from the University of California Los Angeles.He is best known as the author of an article which was plagiarised by the British government in a 2003 briefing document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (see Dodgy Dossier). This document was a follow-up to the earlier September Dossier, both of which concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and were ultimately used by the government to justify its involvement in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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