Well, before Teribuws returns in triumph to tell us that the student's work WAS published, it turns out that it was...but not in an actual academic journal. It was published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs, a vanity internet publication of a single professor, Barry Rubin, which in addition to the journal offers several of Rubin's self-published books.

In academia, internet journals are generally taken less seriously than actual paper publications, and thus attract less reliable research. Journals "owned and operated" by one person, as MERIA claims to be, are accorded even less respect. The fact that our student chose to publish there strongly suggests he could not publish elsewhere.

No disrespect to Professor Rubin, who by all accounts is a serious scholar, but one person should not have that much power over a journal's contents--especially since Rubin is also a right-wing Israeli hawk who writes a conservative column for the Jerusalem Post. A political perspective is fine, but not when you have autocratic authority over the contents of what is ostensibly an objective scholarly publication.

BTW, while in grad school I did not even bother to publish in internet journals because it does your career no good--no one takes it seriously. I did, however, publish in some one-man operations--though none where the editor was so clearly positioned politically--and those papers have much less impact on my CV than the ones published in serious journals. So our student, Ibrahim Al-Marashi (who still seems to be a student as far as I can tell, not having graduated yet) apparently couldn't get this into a real journal.

Al-Marashi, by the way, has had some interesting things to say on the matter. He complains that his research was "sexed up," by which he means that Downing Street lied about Iraq supporting terrorist groups like Al-Qaida, which he claims they did not, and about numerous other matters in his work. I quote him:

These two dossiers have undermined serious research conducted by think-tanks and policy centres. Number 10 should leave the publications of such reports to professionals who have devoted their careers to such work.

The September 2002 dossier stated that 45 minutes is all Iraq needed to arm and deploy a chemical or biological weapon. Publishing such a figure only proves that Downing Street is not a proper research institution.

No professional analyst would publish a figure such as this, based on only one source. This time span does not take into account the complicated Iraqi chain of command and the technical requirements needed to prepare and launch such a weapon.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/06/05/do0501.xml)

In fairness, Al-Marashi says that more time is needed to assess whether Iraq had violated relevant UN sanctions concerning WMDs. In other words, while Al-Marashi may be more hawkish than some of our leftists, he too disagrees with the article Casual Observer posted here.