Hillary Clinton has proved that she can outdo the historical record of her husband, Bill. Whereas President Clinton is mainly remembered for lying about his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton will now be remembered for having lied about a trip she made to Bosnia in 1996. You can watch her account of that trip, and compare it to the news reports at the time, here.

Hillary Clinton’s lie is, in my view, worse than Bill’s about Monica. When Bill Clinton said he had “never had sexual relations with that woman”, he knew that he was telling an untruth. The sentence was strictly true because by “sexual relations” he meant “sexual intercourse,” but he used semantics with the intention to deceive his listeners into believing that there had been no sexual relations of any kind with her, which there had been.

Hillary’s lie is of a different order. Her description of landing at Tuzla airport in 1996 and having to run to the car for fear of sniper fire was pure fantasy. She said there was no welcoming ceremony on the tarmac, when in fact there was. She was met by the president of Bosnia, and a schoolgirl who read her a poem. She did not run to the cars but instead spent several moments on the tarmac, in no danger of sniper fire whatever. 1996 was a year after the end of the war in Bosnia and the country was at peace.

The lie tells us something important about American political culture. It shows, unfortunately, to what extent militarism has become the dominant political ethic in that country. No other democracy regularly apostrophises the head of its executive as “the commander in chief”, and the rather primitive and exaggerated admiration for the capacity to inflict violence which is encapsulated by this phrase has become a decisive factor in the ups and downs of every American presidential campaign. John McCain, the real “Manchurian candidate”, is campaigning heavily on the basis of his war record, and Hillary’s fantasies about her trip to Bosnia were presumably an attempt to counter this.

Unfortunately, however, it is not the only lie that has been told about the Balkans. During NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, all NATO leaders, including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, told much worse lies in their attempt to bolster public support for the violence they were inflicting on Yugoslavia. Hillary’s infantile fantasy about Tuzla pales in comparison with this statement by the British Prime Minister in 1999 about what was happening in Kosovo: “Women raped. Children seeing their fathers dragged away to be shot. Thousands executed. Tens of thousands beaten. 100,000 men missing. 1.5 million people driven from their homes.”

If Hillary was awarded “four Pinocchios” for her ultimately harmless braggadocio about Tuzla, Blair should be awarded the Adolf Hitler prize for telling such a Big Lie that no one would ever believe that he would have the audacity to tell it, and that therefore people would believe it. This quote from Blair is just one of many dozens of similar dishonest claims. I cannot, of course, rule out that women were raped in Kosovo, but I do rule out that children saw their fathers dragged away to be shot, that thousands were executed, or that any of Blair’s other claims were true. As I have detailed in my own books and articles on the subject there was never any racial genocide in Kosovo or anything remotely approaching it. Indeed, the evidence for Blair’s claims proved so non-existent – as non-existent as the later weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – that the charge of genocide was never even included in the otherwise fantastical indictment brought against Slobodan Milosevic by the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in May 1999.

That lie, unfortunately, unlike Hillary’s, and unlike the equivalent lies about Iraq, has not yet been really “found out”. People may not feel as emotional about Kosovo today as they did in 1999 (it is a feature of our sentimental political culture that moral outrage is as transient as it is intense) but they still believe that the Serbs committed terrible atrocities against the Albanians. In many cases, this belief in based on such a shaky grasp of the facts that Britain’s “leading quality newspaper” was able to write “Kosovo” instead of “Bosnia” when reporting Hillary Clinton’s Tuzla tall tale.

Concomitantly, they believe that the Albanians have a right to a state, having been such poor victims in the recent past. Very few people know about the counter-evidence produced during the Milosevic trial, for instance about how heavily armed the Albanians were (whereas the propaganda presented them as defenceless civilians); about how there was no plan to drive out the civilian population; about the terrible atrocities committed by Albanians; or about how all the Serb and Yugoslav armed forces were under strict instructions to observe the rules of war. The lies told by NATO to justify its war of aggression have become accepted truths and it will be a very long time, if ever, before they are rumbled.

We will therefore live with the consequences of this lie for many decades to come. As a result of it, a large piece of Mafia turf has been elevated to the status of sovereign statehood; a huge US base has been built in Kosovo, and it is evidently there to stay; and a people which fought bravely against the Nazis has been comprehensively demonised. The historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued that history follows very long cycles, and he is right: decisions (often based on lies) can have consequences which last for centuries. The lies told to justify the Protestant reformation or the French revolution have proved astonishingly successful, and they persist; Lenin’s decision to federalise the Russian empire, on the basis that the new administrative units reflected the pre-existence of distinct nations within the Soviet Union, was based on a lie whose consequences have still not fully developed.

We must, though, be thankful for small mercies. It seems likely that Hillary’s lie will have one short-term consequence, about which I am personally happy – and that is that she will never now be elected president of the United States.