Oh, boy. The dossier on Iraq pub­lished by the British Prime Minister’s office — which was lauded by Colin Pow­ell yes­ter­day at the United Nations — appears to have been pla­gia­rized from a small Mid­dle East­ern stud­ies Jour­nal.
The dossier, “Iraq: Its Infra­struc­ture of Con­ceal­ment Decep­tion and Intim­i­da­tion,” was pub­lished Mon­day on the office of the prime minister’s web site, www​.num​ber​-10​.gov​.uk. It repro­duced, almost ver­ba­tim, por­tions of an arti­cle from the Mid­dle East Review of Inter­na­tional Affairs, accord­ing to Cam­bridge aca­d­e­mic Glen Ran­wala. The author of the orig­i­nal arti­cle is Ibrahim al-Marashi, a post­grad­u­ate stu­dent from Mon­terey in Cal­i­for­nia.
One sec­tion, six para­graphs long, on Saddam’s Spe­cial Secu­rity Orga­ni­za­tion uses the exact lan­guage, even down to the typo­graph­i­cal errors, as al-Marashi’s arti­cle ldoes. There also seems to be sev­eral places where the lan­guage was made more sin­is­ter. For exam­ple, Down­ing Street says Iraq’s Mukhabarat, the main intel­li­gence agency, is “spy­ing on for­eign embassies in Iraq” while the orig­i­nal lan­guage says it is “mon­i­tor­ing for­eign embassies.“
The dossier does not appear now on the PM’s site, to the best of my search­ing. Per­haps it’s been pulled?
[UPDATE: Thanks to a clear-eyed reader, the dossier link is here. I just never found it. Oop­sies.]
I can only shake my head at this. I under­stand that Team Bush — which now must surely include Tony Blair — is feel­ing the pres­sure to make their case to invade Iraq and top­ple Sad­dam. I’m not say­ing the infor­ma­tion in the dossier isn’t true, but cred­i­bil­ity is all-important here. How can the United States and Britain be so care­less as to rip off jour­nals to pro­duce heav­ily scru­ti­nized reports? Don’t they know how this will appear to the world? The Arab world is utterly sus­pi­cious of the Anglo Alliance’s motives. France and Rus­sia are skep­ti­cal, too. This is the moral equiv­a­lent of plant­ing evi­dence. While you know the guy’s guilty, and the evi­dence is likely there, there are pro­ce­dures pros­e­cu­tors have to fol­low, oth­er­wise the whole process is com­pro­mised.
But per­haps this is the point. Team Bush has been con­temp­tu­ous of the U.N. since he took office, and this seems more of a pat­tern that comes from the White House — and now from Down­ing Street. Actions such as this tell the world that Team Bush will do any­thing to get their way with Iraq.
And that’s not the way to win the peace after a war.