Robert Harris is a fine thriller writer. In today’s Guardian interview with him, this one-time close ally and friend of Tony Blair talks about the genesis of his new novel, The Ghost, whose plot revolves around the ghosted memoirs of a fictional British prime minister:

But for some reason he couldn’t make it work — until last summer, and Israel’s war in Lebanon. ‘Coming on top of the crazy decision to attack Iraq, it just seemed the ultimate example of a complete collapse of independent British foreign policy. Because the Americans wouldn’t condemn Israel, we couldn’t say anything either - and yet even a lot of Israelis recognised that it was a massive loss of civilian life, equivalent to the British bombing Dublin to deal with terrorism in Ulster. Without getting into the whole detail of the issue, we should at least have been a bit more even-handed about the whole thing. And I think that that did Blair terrible damage. At that point I think he was doomed, really.’

Groan. Here we go again. Leave aside the issue of Iraq — Harris appears to have swallowed wholesale the Big Lie of last year’s Lebanon war. Let’s recap, briefly.

What prompted Israel’s military action in Lebanon was not comparable to terrorism in Northern Ireland. The IRA was not the proxy army of the Irish government whose aim was to destroy Britain altogether and then take over Europe; it had not assembled thousands of rockets trained on Britain’s west coast; it did not unleash a barrage of rockets on Britain’s towns as cover for kidnapping British soldiers on British soil. Substitute Hezbollah for the IRA, Iran for Ireland, Israel for Britain and the Islamic world for Europe, and you have the proper context for last year’s Lebanon war. If Britain had ever been in such a position vis-a-vis the IRA and Ireland, it would not merely have regarded last summer’s initial Hezbollah offensive as an act of war rather than mere terrorism but would have regarded the decade long build up of rockets and repeated regular shellings of its own country and cross-border raids as acts of war requiring a military response long before July 2006.

Next, there was no ‘massive loss of civilian life’ — quite the contrary. As far as I know, some 1200 people in Lebanon died during the war. Although it is not known how many of them were Hezbollah soldiers since they disguised themselves as civilians, according to the Israelis 500-600 of these fatalities were actually Hezbollah fighters. Only relatively small areas of Beirut were bombed. Given the scale of the bombardment of Israel from Lebanon, with more rockets fired at it in some four weeks than during the Blitz on London during World War Two, the relative restraint and carefully limited nature of the Israeli response (which certainly had many faults) would never have been shown in similar circumstances by any other country. But the British media nevertheless viciously misrepresented the whole thing, inducing a national hysteria and madness — which was what drove Tony Blair from office earlier than he had intended. It was one of the most disgraceful episodes in contemporary British history. Patently false Hezbollah propaganda claims were uncritically regurgitated by the British media as fact, which I commented upon here.

As an Israeli army captain observed here:

This was perhaps both the most cynical and barbaric disregard for innocent civilian lives of all of Hezballah’s and Iran’s strategic choices. It was also the most successful. It was predicated not on its knowledge of its enemy (Israel) but its true genius lay in its knowledge of the press. The calculus was simple: launch a rocket from within a civilian population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. If the Jews hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s a victory. If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid to hit civilians, that’s a victory. Now repeat the process until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in so doing kill more Lebanese civilians. That’s the ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just those chords exactly what music the press will play. The awful truth, which the western press was manipulated to ignore or downplay, was that Iran, through its terrorist operational arm Hezballah, had invaded Lebanon from within. Hezballah did not protect Lebanon, they occupied it and they used those Hezballah occupied territories to launch Iran’s offensive in response to the West’s ultimatum to cease development of nuclear weapons.

Robert Harris should stick to real fiction.