My plagiarised work was used to justify the war on Iraq

Imagine it is February 5, 2003. The US Secretary of State speaks before the United Nations, holding your work in his hands, as he calls for war against another sovereign nation. How would you feel?

Well it happened to me and I was shocked.

That night, I visited my parents’ home in Monterey, California, and watched Colin Powell present to the UN a montage of satellite photos purporting to show weapons of mass destruction, the intercepted calls of an Iraqi officer who supposedly hid them and claimed that Iraq had anthrax. use to carry out a terrorist attack.

Finally, Powell said: “I would like to draw the attention of my colleagues to the fine paper circulated by the United Kingdom yesterday, which describes Iraq’s deception activities in great detail.” I almost jumped off the velor corner sofa in my parents’ living room.

“Mom, that’s my work he’s holding in his hands!” I screamed.

“Uh huh,” she said, fixated on the TV, perhaps not hearing what I had just said.

The day before I had learned from a Cambridge University scientist that an article based on a chapter of my dissertation I had published online, in an ‘intelligence file’, had been plagiarized. The British government waved this document in an effort to rally public support domestically for an attack on Iraq. It was also apparently passed on to the Americans.

I went to sleep that night wondering how, if my mother wasn’t even convinced, the world would ever know about my plagiarized research.

I was awakened at dawn the next day by a phone call from a CNN journalist in London asking, “How does it feel to know that the British government has plagiarized your research?”

For a struggling young Iraqi-American doctoral student at Oxford University, it felt unreal.

The news had come out in London while I was sleeping in my cot in California, lying diagonally so my legs wouldn’t dangle over the side. I stared at the model airplanes I built as a teenager and hung from the ceiling. The real-life versions of those planes were going to bomb Iraq in a few weeks, and I was unwillingly involved.

The article plagiarized by the British government was about the Iraqi security sector – the complicated, confusing and intricate network of secret police, espionage and military units that supported Saddam Hussein’s rule and his ‘republic of fear’.

My research, which focused on Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in the run-up to the 1990 Gulf War, illustrated the brutality of Saddam’s regime. Maybe that’s why it was plagiarized by the British. But it in no way advocated the invasion of the country by foreign powers.

The authors of the “intelligence file” had changed key words from my article to suggest that Iraq had supported al-Qaeda and then supplemented the plagiarized material with their own pages advocating military action.

This act of plagiarism by the British government would propel me on a trajectory of fame and infamy. British media would use my work to point out the flawed intelligence presented by the US and UK prior to the invasion. And months later I would testify to a parliamentary inquiry into the actions of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government.

I would be portrayed by the media alternately as a champion of the truth, who helped expose the lies of the US and British governments, and as a person who supposedly encouraged the invasion. Some even went so far as to label me as the “man who started the war”, causing me to experience my fair share of animosity in my personal and public life.

I did indeed oppose Saddam’s regime and its brutality, but I did not want war.

Thinking back to what happened 20 years ago, I feel bitter and traumatized. Studying Saddam’s Iraq was not easy, but neither was examining the outcome of his impeachment. It is deeply disturbing to document what has happened to the Iraqis over the past 20 years.

In that regard, I also regret not using the media attention I enjoyed in 2003 to warn sharply of the chaos the invasion would unleash.

The security services I studied projected fear into the lives of most Iraqis. They were also a huge job provider for those loyal to Saddam. After the 2003 invasion, it was clear to me that if the hundreds of thousands of men employed by those security services were not rehabilitated and reintegrated into Iraqi society, they would use violence to undermine the new state.

Of course, the provisional authority of the coalition did not have that foresight. It disbanded the security services and the entire Iraqi military, already alienated from the security sector that Saddam guarded.

That decision freed thousands of Iraqi men, skilled in the use of weapons, to join the various insurgencies and armed groups that wreaked havoc in the country over the next two decades.

Today, the Iraqi state remains weak and has no monopoly on the use of force. Despite extensive training and financial support from the US, the security forces in Iraq are not as effective as their predecessors in maintaining law and order, preventing criminal violence against civilians or stopping terrorist attacks. Worse, they have joined countless other actors – gangs, armed groups, militias, tribes, etc. – in inflicting brutal violence on Iraqis.

In October 2019, massive protests erupted in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. They reflected the societal drive and desire for a change of the status quo that had been established by the US after 2003. They demanded not only security, good services, a dignified life and an end to corruption, but also an Iraqi state that serves Iraqis, not foreign powers.

The protests were brutally suppressed by paramilitary forces, who continued for months to threaten, kidnap and kill people associated with this movement for change.

Iraq indeed remains a republic of anarchy.

In investigative articles I published after the invasion, I argued that security sector reform and a truth and reconciliation process would have been a more sustainable way to achieve disarmament and reintegration of the members of Saddam-era agencies, but neither was once pursued in Iraq. I would have been happy if those papers had been plagiarized, gained a wide audience at the UN and finally implemented. Unfortunately, they weren’t.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.