False Premises

The US withdrawal from Iraq has produced another blip on the anti-war Blair-rage meter, in which open-minded people considered positions they had previously adopted and reassessed them from first principles.

“The war was based on the false premise that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” Mark Mardell, the BBC North America Editor, said on the News on Wednesday. I would say this treads a fine line on factual accuracy, but steps over it on impartiality.

The phrasing seems designed to suggest that the premise was false and known to be false, an implication that the BBC, of all media organisations, ought to be careful making. What would have been wrong with “mistaken premise”, for example? It could not be, could it, that there are still, after all these years, people at the BBC unable to tell the difference between a falsehood and something that turns out not to be true?

Mardell’s online report that day was even more opinionated, speaking of “the fantasy about weapons of mass destruction”, albeit in the context of Barack Obama’s apparent acceptance of the case for military action.

No surprise that the Guardian, meanwhile, lends its editorial support to the childish “Blair lied” story. Simon Tisdall wrote on Wednesday:

When Bush and his loquacious frontman, Tony Blair, made the case for the war, they repeatedly strained the truth, and sometimes lied outright.

(“Loquacious frontman”, eh? Now that’s what I call writing.) The link is to a conspiracist anti-war website built from the foundations up on the false premise that an assertion that turns out to be untrue is a lie.

The Iraq Inquiry Coverage Rebuttal Service has been somewhat in abeyance lately, as Sir John Chilcot’s committee has gone into that circle of hell known as “writing that book they have been working on for years”. Sir John confirmed in a letter to Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary (pdf), written in October but published on the Inquiry website on Wednesday, that

we will need until at least next summer to prepare a draft report which will do justice to the issues. We are also mindful that it will need to withstand the level of detailed scrutiny to which it will inevitably be subjected.

So a draft report will not be ready before next summer. However, whenever it comes, the IICRS stands ready to rebut the false premises of the detailed scrutiny to which it will, inevitably, be subjected by the anti-war media.

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