"Saddam Hussein was a dangerous and gathering threat and the president made the right decision to remove him from power," Scott McClellan, spokesman for US President George W. Bush, said during an election-year stop here to push for limiting medical liability lawsuits.

McClellan strove to limit the fallout from remarks by David Kay, who just resigned as chief of the US-led effort to find the weapons at the center of Bush's case for launching the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Kay said Sunday that he did not think that Saddam possessed such arms at the time the war began. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said a day earlier that it was an "open question" whether that was the case but insisted that the ousted Iraqi leader planned to develop them.

"We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found that so far the weapons did not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why," Kay told National Public Radio.

"What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, why wasn't that known beforehand?" Powell told journalists traveling with him from Washington to the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

After insisting during the run up to the war that Saddam could arm terrorists with chemical or biological weapons on "any given day," Bush said in his State of the Union speech earlier this month that Kay had reported on "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Opposition Democrats vying for their party's nomination to challenge Bush in the November 2 elections have seized on the evolving case for war and the failure thus far to locate any banned weapons.

"It means that (Vice President) Dick Cheney and others in the administration misled the American people with respect to the true status of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Senator John Kerry told CBS television.

The Massachusetts lawmaker last week won the Iowa caucus, the starting point for a long battle for the nomination.

Retired general Wesley Clark, who trails Kerry in the polls, was blunter, saying of Bush, "He went to war without an imminent threat, without a connection between Iraq and the events of nine/11," meaning September 11, 2001.

"He went to war before the diplomatic alternatives were exhausted, before our allies were on board, before we had a plan for what we were going to do when we got to Baghdad and without adequate forces on the ground to do it with," he added.

"So, I don't support the way the president's made these decisions. I think it's been bad leadership," he said.

Cheney said before the war that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes if necessary and insisted at the World Economic Forum over the weekend that the invasion had thwarted Saddam's weapons ambitions.

The political fallout from the embarrassing failure to find the weapons at the core of Bush's case for war is unclear, though the ongoing debate appears to be taking its toll on the president's patience.

In a December 2003 interview with ABC television, his questioner sought to contrast pre-war assertions that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction with post-war claims that he sought to develop them.

"So what's the difference?" Bush snapped.

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