Rumsfeld shifts stance on Iraq weapons

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday that the US had not gone to war against Iraq because of fresh evidence of weapons of mass destruction but because Washington saw old evidence "in a dramatic new light" after September 11.

The claim, in testimony to the Senate, reflected a sharp change in tactics by an administration that is under fire for knowingly basing its case against Saddam Hussein on flawed intelligence.

President George Bush yesterday accused his critics of "trying to rewrite history", and insisted that "there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace". In his State of the Union address in January, the president referred to a British intelligence report that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, for use in its nuclear weapons programme.

But the White House this week admitted the claim was not based on solid information, and that documents purporting to show an Iraqi attempt to buy "yellow cake" raw uranium from Niger had been forged.

The administration yesterday played down the importance of the allegations made by the president in his January speech, and then by the secretary of state, Colin Powell, in a presentation to the UN in February. Instead, the president and his aides all suggested that the case against Saddam had been built on his cumulative defiance of the international community.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Rumsfeld told the Senate armed services committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11 [September 11]."

His remarks were controversial not only because they implied that fresh evidence of Saddam's activity did not play a role in going to war. The comments also implied that the link between Iraq and al-Qaida was built more on changing perceptions of the danger such an alliance would pose, rather than on evidence that it actually existed, as the administration had claimed.

Questioned on the issue during a visit to South Africa, President Bush was adamant. "The first question is, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power

"And so there's going to be a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that," he added. "But I am absolutely confident in the decision I made."