In the sporadic debate about when we will have an inquiry into the Iraq war, something very important has been forgotten. Last year, just before he became prime minister, Gordon Brown announced that he had asked cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to ensure that a debacle like the Iraq dossier would never happen again (not in those words, of course). I wrote here that the question of who really wrote the dossier went to the heart of what Sir Gus had been asked to find out. At the time, Brown said it was too early to hold a full inquiry but that there were “lessons to be learned for the future”. So what did Gus teach Gordon?

Two weeks ago, I wrote to Sir Gus, inviting him to pass on what he had found out regarding the influence of “communications professionals”, special advisers and politicians on the dossier. I invited him to do so in the interests of transparency, arguing that public confidence in open government and government itself would be better served by a voluntary disclosure than by having the information dragged out by means of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

I have not had a reply and so today I’ve submitted a new FOIA request to the Cabinet Office in these terms. I can imagine that they might try to string it out as usual and use one of the many exemptions in the Act. In fact, there is one exemption based on an intention to publish something “at some time future date, whether determined or not”. You can have the truth – just not yet.

Putting it that way would make the politics of concealment hard to justify. In March, the House of Commons held a debate on a Tory motion for an inquiry now. The government’s position is that an inquiry cannot take place until all troops have left Iraq. Conveniently, they aren’t leaving any time soon and most aren’t doing much either.

Interestingly, it was reported last week that special forces (eg, the SAS) are engaged in Basra. Of course, the British government has a policy of not commenting on the activities of its special forces, except when it suits them to feed misinformation to the media. This raises the intriguing possibility that the 4,100 visible troops might come home some time, but there will still be no inquiry because of some unseen activity that we can’t be told about and may not actually be happening.

The main – quite preposterous – argument for delaying an inquiry is that it would distract people involved in the ongoing “overwatch” operation. In his letter promising an inquiry, Brown showed the weakness of his “not yet” argument by resorting to preposterous hyperbole: “the whole effort of the government and the armed forces is directed towards supporting the people and government of Iraq.”

You could point out that this is rather worrying for the troops in Afghanistan – and explains why Gordon has taken his eye off the ball elsewhere – but it’s also quite laughable to suggest that a democracy cannot ask how and why it went to war because some of its troops are engaged in a training mission. Not to mention that we have already had four inquiries along the way.

Professor Peter Hennessy has said that a paragraph in Brown’s new national security strategy was “the nearest we are going to get to an apology from the government for the way Tony Blair took this country to war in Iraq.” Brown has so far only hinted that the dossier was “sexed up”, but did say sorry yesterday over the 10p tax rate. Hennessy argued that: “[...] we must have a proper inquiry into the road to the Iraq war, the invasion and its aftermath if Gordon Brown means what he says in [the strategy]. He can do no less; and we can wait no longer.”

The thing about the promise of a future inquiry is that it changes the dynamics of the debate. Where people say, with some justification, “this was all a long time ago”, the government’s line is now that it is too early to start digging into it. But whatever Sir Gus has found out, he has already found out. Any attempt to conceal an existing account of exactly how the case for war was “sexed up” would make very clear that it’s not learning the lessons but sharing the knowledge that’s being delayed until, say, after the next election.

Or, perhaps, there never was any attempt to “learn lessons”. Perhaps the whole thing was just another dodgy PR stunt.