WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (AFP) - Democrats on Wednesday slammed the White House Wednesday for leading a months-long search to uncover an Iraqi weapons program that apparently did not exist when the United States invaded the country.
Lawmakers hammered chief US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer after his Iraq Survey Group (ISG) came up empty-handed in searching for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program -- the basis for Washington's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Duelfer conceded at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he probably would not find "militarily significant" stocks of weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq.
"What you're telling us is that in addition to having no WMD stocks before the war ... Saddam chose not to have those weapons," said Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the committee.
"Those are stunning statements," said Levin. "That is a 180-degree difference from what the (George W. Bush) administration was saying before the war."
"The fundamental conclusion of the ISG effort means that the administration's two major arguments for going to war against Iraq were incorrect," Levin said.
Duelfer said that not only did Iraq not have an active weapons program but it had not pursued banned weapons since weapons inspections began in 1991.
Duelfer told the panel he found the remnants of a former weapons program in delapidated condition, which could have been reconstituted at a future date if Saddam had the opportunity.
But lawmakers angrily noted that that risk was far from the immediate threat the White House had insisted the Iraqi leader posed at the time of the US invasion.
"We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction," Levin said.
In addition to Duelfer's testimony, the Iraq Survey Group issued a report Wednesday which underscored the absence of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led invasion.
And while Saddam Hussein hoped to develop a long-range missile system, his weapons development program was in such disrepair that little work was ever done on warheads, Duelfer said.
When challenged by Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the group's "wild goose chase" for WMDs despite several months and millions of dollars spent looking for the weapons, Duelfer defended the effort.
"My task was not to find weapons of mass destruction, my task was to find the truth," he told the committee.
Duelfer could not explain why Saddam did not try harder to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors in a bid to avoid invasion by the United States and its allies.
"It's a question which many of us have puzzled over," he said. "It really requires you to get into Saddam's mind.
"The answer is, it's difficult to know for certain," continued Duelfer, who said Saddam apparently failed to understand that business as usual no longer applied after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"He wanted to get sanctions lifted. He kept trying to bargain and barter and had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer told the senators.
"That was Saddam's intelligence failure," he said. "He did not understand very quickly the dramatic change of the international landscape."