How A Comma and an Oxford Thesis Started the 2003 Iraq War
Ibrahim Al-Marash |
TEDxIEMadrid
• June 2020
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!