Cheney: Saddam's lack of WMD justifies war

US Vice President Dick Cheney asserted today that a report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, who found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines President Bush’s decision to go to war.

The report shows that “delay, defer, wasn’t an option”, Cheney told a town-hall style meeting in Miami.

While Democrats seized on the new report by Charles Duelfer to bolster their case that invading Iraq was a mistake, Cheney focused on portions of the report that were more favourable to the administration’s case.

While saying that Saddam’s weapons programme had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, the report did say that Saddam’s main goal was to get international sanctions lifted.

“As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back” to his weapons programme, Cheney said.

Cheney said the report also concluded that the United Nations’ Fuel for Food programme “was totally corrupted by Saddam Hussein. There were suggestions employees of the United Nations were part of the scheme as well.”

“The suggestion is clearly there by Mr Duelfer that Saddam had used the programme in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,” Cheney said.

That being the case, there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.

Duelfer’s report said what ambitions Saddam harboured for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.

The report of the weapons hunter was presented to senators and the public in the midst of a fierce presidential election campaign in which Iraq and the war on terror have become the overriding issues.