Comment (11 February 2003).

Published in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 14 February 2003.

For serious analysts of the politics and international relations of the Middle East, the prospect of a detailed report by the British intelligence services on the current security infrastructure of Iraq was rousing. A secretive system of multiple layers of authority and complex chains of command, about which no academic scholars had a clear understanding, was about to be uncovered, thus exposing the workings of a highly repressive set of institutions. After that dossier was unveiled, Prime Minister Blair told the House of Commons on 3 February of how grateful we should be to receive this information. "It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services," said Blair. "It is the intelligence that they are receiving, and we are passing it on to people."

Yet to me, the document seemed oddly familiar. Checking it against three journal articles published over the past six years, I discovered that the majority of the British document - including the entire section detailing the structures of the Iraqi security services - had been lifted straight from those articles. Academics - including one California-based postgraduate student primarily using information from 1991 - had become caught up in the justification for war.

The only exceptions were the tweaking of specific phrases. The reference to how Iraq was "aiding opposition groups" in neighbouring states in one article turned into a statement of how it was "supporting terrorist groups" in the words of the dossier. A mention in an article of how one group was made up of "bullies and country bumpkins" was shorn of its last three words in the dossier: Iraqi country bumpkins, clearly, are not about to launch an attack on the UK, and so have no role in the document's rhetorical strategy. Apart from these and similar amendments, the texts were left identical: even a misplaced comma was retained.

The slapdash manner in which the dossier was put together was also apparent from its mistakes. For example, it lifts a section on the General Security Service from one article, and turns it into the latter half of a section on the Military Security Service. As a result, we find that the Military Security Service, created in 1992, moved its headquarters in 1990.

This is the third dossier put out by the UK government. The first from last September addressed what is purportedly the rationale for military action against Iraq: Saddam Hussein's alleged production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The problem was that these claims could be checked: Iraq invited UN inspectors to visit the sites of concern, and they have found nothing to raise suspicions.

With the argument about the large-scale development of prohibited weapons looking increasingly implausible, the US shifted tack. Now the problem was not the immediate threat of Iraq, but Saddam Hussein's "unique evil". Ever eager to support the changing US line, the British government responded with a second dossier. This was on human rights in Iraq, and largely about the crimes committed by the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. As human rights organisations said at the time, this was a crass and opportunistic attempt to justify a war on the basis of events that had been committed largely with the compliance of the UK and US at the time. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was hobbled when the story of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein - possibly giving the green light to Iraq's use of chemical weapons - reappeared on the front pages of US newspapers.

And so the US focus changed again. Now the problem was primarily phrased in terms of the ineffectiveness of weapons inspections in the absence of Iraq's full cooperation. On the face of it, this is an implausible argument: a key role of inspections is in deterring any attempt by Iraq to reconstruct its industries to produce these weapons, through its monitoring activities. In present circumstances, Iraq may be able to hide a few vials and canisters of agents that have largely decomposed, but it cannot develop the means to threaten the outside world.

However, as Secretary of State Powell made it clear that his statement to the Security Council of 5 February would concentrate on this theme, Mr Blair may have sensed that his government needed to produce something quickly to substantiate the US position.

The case for war on Iraq has largely been made on the back of information that politicians claim to be presenting from the intelligence services. In this case, the intelligence services either were not consulted even though the information was sourced to them; or, possibly more likely, they provided an assessment that did not fit in with the politicians' argument. Downing Street, in trying to pander to the US stance without the argumentative means to do so, resorted to a strategy that many have adopted in similar circumstances: petty plagiarism.