Pants On Fire

I've been reading up on the thoughts of Mehdi Hasan recently - in fact ever since I wrote the post about Winged Horses on 23 April 2013.

What's jumped out at me is Mehdi's fondness for calling other people 'liars' - Tony Blair being a good example - so here is Mehdi in action as a journalist, searching for the truth, as it were.

"Did Tony Blair tell the truth about Iraq? Or did he deceive us? As the nation prepares for the former prime minister's testimony at the Iraq inquiry, one ex-adviser to Blair tells the New Statesman this week: "There is a little bit of rhetorical exaggeration in what Tony said at the time, though he always believed that there were WMD in Iraq, as did I, so it was exaggeration rather than lying.

Seven years on from the invasion of Iraq, this myth persists – even amongst critics of the war. It doesn't make sense to call him a liar," Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, tells me. "I think he convinced himself."

Blair himself is a keen purveyor of this self-serving and self-deluding nonsense. ""I have never told a lie. No. I don't intend to go telling lies to people. I did not lie over Iraq," he told Sky's Adam Boulton in 2005.

Sorry, but I don't buy it. Call me a cynic but I have no doubt in my mind that the former premier lied over Iraq, Saddam Hussein and WMD – and did so again and again. He knowingly, deliberately and consciously misled parliament, the public and the press. In the under-reported words of Lord Butler, speaking in the House of Lords in February 2007, Blair was, at the very minimum, "disingenuous".

However, to borrow a phrase from the ex-premier himself, I happen to believe the evidence for his mendacity and dissembling on Iraq is "extensive, detailed and authoritative". Here's a sample of 10 such lies, deceptions and half-truths in no particular order."

Now the definition of a lie is to make a statement which the speaker knows to be false - and which is made with the intention of persuading the person hearing the statement to believe that it is true.

So the key point seems to be that you are definitely lying if you say something which is false -  and which you know to be false before speaking the fateful words.

But if a person says something that is patently false - but which they believe to be true then they are not lying - stupid perhaps, ill-informed certainly, maybe even reckless - but the person is not saying something which they know in advance to be false.

All of which I find really intriguing when it comes to the fall-out from the decision to invade Iraq - which was taken after a full vote in Parliament of course and supported by most Labour and other MPs.

For the most part people now believe - or at least most sensible people believe - that the UK Government supported the invasion of Iraq because it believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and presented a real threat to world peace.

Now I have no doubt that the Labour Government of the day put the most positive spin possible on the case that it was presenting to the House of Commons - but I don't know many people who say that as Prime Minister, Tony Blair was lying through his teeth at the time.

Because there are plenty of people independent of the Labour Government who would tell you otherwise - and they were there at the time - even if there are others who say, in the face of all the evidence, say that Tony Blair was seeking regime change in Iraq - come hell or high water.

So I find it fascinating that an otherwise intelligent person like Mehdi Hasan - can believe in the 'liar, liar, pants of fire' version of history when it comes to Tony Blair - despite all the intelligence evidence available to the Labour Government at the time. 

Even if Mehdi disputes some - or indeed all - of this evidence it surely comes down to a political judgement call on the part of the Prime Minister which a majority of MPs in the House of Commons had to support - before military action could proceed.

Yet despite Mehdi's denunciations of Tony Blair when there is clear, if arguable evidence in his favour - this left-wing journalist says he believes in the literal truth of a fantastical story about the Prophet Muhammad flying up to heaven on a winged horse.

Which is truly amazing to me because, as as everyone knows, horses don't fly - any more than pigs or elephants can fly - up to heaven or anywhere else.

In which case is Mehdi lying or just deluded when he says he believes in this tale from the Koran - given the total lack of fossil evidence for winged horses existing in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, or at any other time in human history?

Now I don't have a problem with Mehdi Hasan writing for the News Statesman or any other publication - but I do think he has a cheek to write this smug, self-satisfied nonsense while operating to such obvious double standards.