Ibrahim al-Marashi (Arabic:إبراهيم المراشي) is an associate professor at California State University, San Marcos, researching modern Iraqi history. He is an invited lecturer at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at University of San Diego, the School of Public Health at San Diego State University, and the Department of Visual Arts at University of California San Diego. Prior to this, he was a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is also one of the first professors of IE University in Segovia, being a founding member of the IE Segovia faculty.
Marashi was the author of an article which was plagiarized by the British government and reproduced by MI6 in a 2003 briefing document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (see Dodgy Dossier) which was subsequently used by Colin Powell to justify the Invasion of Iraq.
Early life
Marashi is a second-generation American, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, spent five years in the UAE, but spent most of his childhood being raised in the city of Monterey, California. His paternal grandfather originated from Ottoman Iraq and took part in the 1920 Iraqi revolt against British rule following the First World War. After the suppression of the uprising, he fled the Najaf and resettled in Zanzibar. His mother, Dr. Sabah Al-Marashi, was of mixed Iraqi and Lebanese heritage, and his father, Dr. Murtadha Al-Marashi, was born in Zanzibar. Both of Marashi's parents were physicians who emigrated to the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, part of the wider "brain drain" movement in which professionals from the Middle East and other regions sought opportunities abroad.
Growing up in the United States, Marashi was a senior in high school during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He also worked as a researcher for the Congressional Research Service and National Defense University. The report was endorsed by Secretary of State Colin Powell during his address to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003 as an example of detailed British intelligence analysis.
Soon after its publication, however, it became evident that the dossier drew heavily from previously published academic and journalistic sources.
As the journalist Jill Lawless wrote for the Associated Press in 2003:<blockquote>"Passages of several paragraphs are identical in the two documents, others contain very minor alterations. Passages of several paragraphs are identical in the two documents, others contain very minor alterations." (This sentence indeed repeats itself in the printed newspaper article). Marashi's study had been based on Iraqi documents captured during the Gulf War, making the material more than a decade old at the time – Marashi acknowledged the date of his own source material, but MI6 did not acknowledge the discrepancy in theirs.
Academic career after the Dodgy Dossier
In 2004, Marashi obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from Saint Anthony's College at the University of Oxford. Marashi then was given a professorial appointment as a visiting professor in Istanbul, at Sabancı University, where he initially intended to remain permanently before later relocating elsewhere.
At the university where he had just begun teaching, student protests were organized against his presence, with some demonstrators labeling him the "architect of the Iraq War." The situation made it difficult for him to continue his career in Turkey, despite his original plan to settle there permanently.
For a brief time in 2008, he became a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. While teaching here, he was informed by his U-Penn colleague Monroe Price that a new branch of IE University was being built in Segovia, Spain, and that they were looking for new professors. Price knew the Dean of the college, and encouraged Marashi to apply.