Oh Gord, give me an inquiry, but not yet ...

St Augustine, when a young man, was supposed to have prayed "O Lord, give me chastity" and then added mentally "but not just yet."

I was reminded of this by the Prime Minister's recent comments on a full inquiry into the Iraq war.

If you accept that the government really believed the case they put for the invasion - that Saddam was breaching a UN mandate and posed a threat to his neighbours because he had weapons of mass destruction - then this was the worst intelligence failure for at least 21 years.

Regardless of what Hutton himself wrote in his conclusions, the information which came out during the Hutton and Butler inquiries was certainly sufficient to give a very strong indication of some of the things which went wrong. But if there is to be another inquiry, I can see no reason to delay it other than to spare the government from embarrassment.

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