"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair magazine's July issue. No chemical or biological weapons have been found in Iraq despite repeated assertions by President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair before the March 20 invasion that the threat posed by Saddam's vast stocks of banned weapons warranted a war to eliminate them. The United Nations and America's allies were not convinced by the argument that it was justification for a war, which was launched amid protests in many world capitals. Washington's ties with major allies France and Germany are still strained.



Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been "almost unnoticed but huge" - namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door" to a more peaceful Middle East, Wolfowitz was quoted as saying.

The magazine said he made the remarks days before suicide bombings, attributed to al-Qaeda, against Western targets in Riyadh and Casablanca two weeks ago had killed 75 people. The United States announced last month that it was ending military operations in Saudi Arabia, where they have long generated Arab resentment because of their proximity to Islam's holiest sites. Wolfowitz's remarks were released a day after US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, seeking to explain why no weapons of mass destruction had been found, said Iraq may have destroyed them before the US-led invasion.









