How A Comma and an Oxford Thesis Started the 2003 Iraq War
greetings from
carmel california i am talking to you
from my hometown and
the bedroom in which i spent my
childhood
i want you to imagine it is
february 2003 i am
visiting my parents and staying in this
very room
during the winter holidays and it’s
5am and i get a phone call
it is my classmate from oxford
university
who has since gone on to graduate
and has a job with cnn the cnn branch in
london
and while i was sleeping he has called
me to tell me
that the news is going crazy about
you all the newspapers your frontline
material
all the uh tv uh the five o’clock
news is talking about you
what have i done well
you have to imagine in september 2002 i
wrote an
article that was really just chapter two
of my thesis
that i published on the uh on an online
journal about iraq’s
intelligence and security agencies it
was the topic of my thesis
and even though i began the thesis in
the year 2000 i could have never
imagined
that by 2003
a war is going to be waged against my
native iraq
chapter two of my thesis which was
published online
somehow made it into
the british government’s latest
intelligence dossier how did that happen
well a british academic who had read my
article
and then read in september 2002 and then
read the british intelligence dossier
that was made public
in february 2003 notice similarities
in the language between my document and
the british intelligence document
but what helped this british academic
detect
that i had in fact been plagiarized
even as a phd student i saved things to
the last minute and when i submitted my
article i had a misplaced comma
in my article the british government not
only
copied my information but even my
grammatical mistakes
including the misplaced comma that
gave beyond any doubt the
evidence to this british academic that i
had been plagiarized
and he informed the british media while
i
slept the british media was breaking
this news story the british government
had copied an
article from a phd student
and tried to depict this
as the latest intelligence from the
british government
what are the odds of getting a call at
5am
i am sleeping in my childhood bed which
is i’ve
i’ve outgrown it i have to sleep at a
diagonal to just fit in it
and my friend in london is saying can
you talk in that 10 minutes to cnn
london
about how you feel about this i
pause and i just look up the ceiling
where i have these
model airplanes that i used to construct
as a kid
and it’s surreal here i am now at the
uh really at the front of an intern
national relations scandals and i
am still feeling like i’m that 10 year
old child who just wants to go and make
toy airplanes
so what happened next the iraq war
happened now
you see there was no weapons of mass
destruction found in iraq
and really the plagiarism of my article
should have been really
kind of a wake-up call that if they’re
plagiarizing my
information which was really about the
1991 gulf war
and you recycling that information for
the 2003 iraq war
that there’s something faulty in the
british and american justifications for
the invasion of iraq
nonetheless the war happened and no
weapons of mass destruction were found
i returned to oxford in may to uh
and in may 2003 after the war had
finished
i got a letter in the mail imagine
you’re going through the mail
junk mail going through it and then you
see a letter with the stamp of the
british
parliament i opened it and what are they
asking me
they are asking me to testify
there is an inquiry being launched as to
how the british government
misled the public prior
to the invasion of iraq and they’re
asking me to testify
so one beautiful may afternoon i get
onto a train
i leave two hours because you know you
never what
good excuse do you have for being late
to parliament i
get into a train and i’m off to the
british parliament
the train ride is normally less than an
hour 20 minutes into the train ride
i would the train stops in the middle of
the british countryside
outside of reading and for no reason it
just stops
and i said okay whatever the british
train system is notoriously unreliable
i thought it was just you know your
regular uh delay
then 10 minutes past 15 minutes pass
and the passenger sitting around me
we start to talk what are we being
delayed from
a businessman sitting next to me
says uh i have a business meeting
the woman sitting in front of me says i
was hoping to go shopping in london in
oxford circus and then they look at me
and i say i am late for a testimony in
front of the british parliament
the businessman next to me folds his
newspaper points to me in that newspaper
and says oh i’m reading about you right
now i’m reading about your testimony
and here you are sitting next to me
then an announcement comes on
and says we’re sorry for the delay but
apparently there has
been a train explosion i’m sorry an
explosion on the train tracks and we
can’t proceed any further
the woman sitting in front of me starts
to joke and saying it’s your fault
there is somebody wants to delay your
testimony
i called the parliament the secretary
who arranged my testimony
and i told her literally that i can’t
make it to
day there’s an explosion and she made a
joke that
the tony blair must be behind it
she says can you get out of the train
and just take a taxi to london
i say no i’m stuck in the british
countryside i cannot
she goes okay just let us know the
details
the woman sitting in front of me was
quite attractive actually and you know
what i didn’t mind the delay
i really was didn’t mind the delay but i
had this worrying scenario
after she made the joke and the woman of
the parliament the joke
i had this image of a black helicopter
at that moment swooping down from the
sky
landing on top of my train car and who
comes out but james bond
takes out his pistol he puts a silencer
breaks into my train car
walks up to me shoots me in the forehead
with his gun
like that and then of course what does
he do he takes the attractive woman and
then you know what james bond is famous
for and then boom boom boom
the james bond film starts this is what
i was imagining
the train announcer finally says we have
to go back to oxford there are this
train cannot go into london
the train pulls into oxford
i jump out and i get into the first taxi
cab i see and i tell the taxi driver
can you take me to parliament he looks
back to him i mean he probably thinks
stupid american tourist and says
sorry you know there is no parliament in
oxford and i was like yeah i know
i want you to take me to the parliament
in london you know the one with the big
bang i didn’t even have the address in
parliament and i just said go to big ben
he goes do you know how much it costs to
go to a parliament and i was like no
do you and he goes no no one has ever
asked me this
but anyway he goes and he’s off and
while he’s driving he’s just loving the
fact that he’s taking somebody to
testify in parliament
he is on the phone talking to a
significant other saying
you can’t imagine who i have in the back
of my seat
we finally pull up to the parliament the
woman who arranged my
testimony has a bag of money that i
think she just collected from every
parliamentarian to chip in for my taxi
fare which came out to around 260 pounds
and i finally get into the parliament
and
i make my deposition that was
anti-climactic but i just have to say on
the record
i was plagiarized i did not give this
information to the british government
willingly
that ended the first episode years later
i see my
story made into a film starring
james gandolfini of sopranos fame
and who played me now they were joking
leonardo dicaprio did not play me
i was played by an actress named anna
chumsky
so i don’t know what happened maybe i
sound so i sounded so
whiny when i used to give my media
interviews they said oh um
let’s make him into kind of a cathy
woman because that’s who the actress
they found
to play me uh maybe they just didn’t
want to pay me royalties but i was
yeah they chose a woman with my least
favorite actress actually
to play me then i moved to turkey where
i had my first academic position
imagine this what are the odds you’re
giving class
and that should be kind of a harrowing
experience already
but why is this particular class a bit
worrying
imagine you’re walking into class and
you decided to have
a coffee before class starts
and you see a newspaper somebody reading
a newspaper before you’re going to
work and the face looks familiar
and you look closely who is on the front
page of the newspaper well it was me
but what did the front page of the
turkish newspaper say now you have to
imagine this was maybe a year
after the plagiarism it said the man who
started the iraq war
has just moved to istanbul
the way the turkish media kind of
construed my story was
i was the architect of the iraq war in
other words the information i collected
and researched
was deliberately designed to justify and
started a war against my native iraq
uh
i thought okay maybe not that many
people read the newspapers
i get into the taxi on the way to work
and what does the taxi driver said why
did you start the iraq war
i began my class and what
happens i hear voices outside and it’s
protesters
protesters who have organizing saying we
don’t want the architect of the iraq war
at our university
what happened this went on for my entire
career in
turkey where i was dogged as the
architect of the iraq war it made my
life unbearable and even though i loved
turkey
i decided i have to move and i had to
look for a new job
and where did i find a job announcement
well at a brand new university called
i.e
university i didn’t know much about
spain i didn’t know much about this
university i didn’t even know if this
university would ever take off
but i took a risk and decided to apply
there
how was my first year at iu university i
hated it
i was stressed i didn’t know this
university would take off
but after the first year i fell in love
with spain
and i fell in love with that university
it was the greatest
thing that could have ever happened to
me because here i am in the year 2020
and i’m still finding a reason to come
back to spain
every year and lecture at this
university
what’s the lesson behind my experience
well the first lesson is this
learn how to use your commas because
there is a book called eats shoots and
leaves
i highly recommend you purchase it
and in the final page of each shoots and
leaves
what is the final lesson about why you
should learn how to use
the commas because the author lynn trust
says
remember the case of ibrahim al-marashi
and how his misplaced
comma gave away that the british
government plagiarized them
that should be the ultimate lesson on
how to use a comma and the importance of
commas and punctuation
okay you might ask how many people have
read this book
it is sold more than a million copies
okay in other words more than
a million people know that i cannot use
commas anyway i did learn how to use
commas but what’s the other takeaway
from this
unfortunately this entire ted experience
is because we are all had gone through
the experience of quarantine none of us
can meet face to face
as a result of this many of us have
endured mental health
uh trauma as a result of the quarantine
some of us may have even lost loved ones
i i personally did lose
relatives in iran due to the coronavirus
and what is the takeaway of this kind of
this
global traumatic experience
well let’s think of the black death
there would have been no
italian renaissance without the black
death that ravaged
uh europe as well as the world
and i want you to think about this if
the we owe the renaissance
to the black death i want you all of you
who are listening right now to think
what renaissance
will you contribute to once
this covet 19 uh
uh pandemic is over what renaissance
will you contribute to and for anyone
watching this now
i want you to think out of that
renaissance that perhaps
you will be giving your own ted talk
based on your silver lining
whether it’s now in a year or in a
couple of years from now
thank you so much