He won't thank me for saying this, but my respect for David Aaronovitch continues to rise. A man still very firmly of the left, his support for the Iraq war turned him overnight into a pariah among his comrades and exposed him to the kind of thought-crime treatment to which those apostles of open thinking are so prone. Ever since, his writing has been developing an increasing maturity. Now, in an article in today's Guardian, he reveals those same jovial colleagues have been urging him to recant his heresy, particularly in the light of the rash gauntlet he threw down after the war ended:

'"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing I am told by our government or that of the US, ever again. And more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere." '

And yet Aaronovitch is still sticking to his guns and in the most robust fashion:

'The trouble is that I find - partly as a result of the Hutton inquiry (the evidence, not the report) - that I don't believe the government did lie. As the MoD intelligence dissident, Brian Jones, wrote to the Independent last week, "I cast no doubt on Mr Blair's integrity. He evidently believed that Iraq possessed a significant stockpile of chemical or biological weapons and expected them to be recovered during or soon after the invasion... such a discovery would have enhanced, rather than undermined, 'the global fight against weapons proliferation'."

'Perhaps I might allay disappointment by blaming Blair et al for being too credulous, or too willing to adopt the precautionary principle, in order perhaps to maintain solidarity with the Americans. But I invite open-minded readers to consider this. Had there been a dossier released detailing WMD proliferation in, say, Libya, and blaming rogue Islamicist scientists from, say, Pakistan, I would have been just as (or more) sceptical than I was over Iraq. Yet last week Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has admitted trading nuclear information and equipment with countries including Libya, was "the tip of an iceberg for us". What now seems extraordinary is that Iraq may not have been part of the submerged mass. Perhaps Butler will tell us why our government thought otherwise.'

The trouble is, Aaronovitch is still applying logic and rationality to the Iraq issue. For that, he really will not be forgiven.