"You know the debate that went on before the war, but now that an investigative committee has been set up to look into it, I think we should wait until the results of that investigation," he said at the White House.

"As you know, the UN inspectors of UNMOVIC had been working in Iraq for three and a half months. At the point the war was declared, they hadn't found anything," he noted after meeting with Bush in the Oval Office.

The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) had endured repeated criticism from the Bush administration by they time it left Iraq just before the US-led invasion in March 2003.

To pick up where UNMOVIC left off, Washington created the Iraq Survey Group, led by David Kay, who told the US Congress last week that there was no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the war.

Bush's central argument for using force to topple Saddam Hussein was that the Iraqi leader possessed unconventional weapons and could "on any given day" hand them to terrorists like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a staunch war ally, have both bent to pressure and pledged to launch investigations into the gaps between pre-war charges and post-war findings.

WAR.WIRE