Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information on Iraqi arms programs in a new light after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
"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."
Mr Rumsfeld appeared before the committee a day after the White House acknowledged that President George W. Bush's claim in his State of the Union speech that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was based on forged information.
While Mr Bush justified the invasion to topple former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein largely on his alleged chemical and biological weapons and possible pursuit of nuclear weapons, such arms have not been found in the 10 weeks after the war.
Congressional committees are evaluating whether the administration may have used faulty or exaggerated intelligence on Iraq's weapons to justify the war.
Mr Rumsfeld said Iraq "had 12 years to conceal its programs," and "uncovering those programs will take time."
Iraq's refusal to comply with UN resolutions requiring it to show it had destroyed its banned weapons brought on the war, he said. "The United States did not choose a war - Saddam Hussein did. For 12 years he violated 17 United Nations resolutions without cost or consequence," Mr Rumsfeld said.
Mr Rumsfeld also maintained that most of Iraq is safe after the war, with most of the recent attacks against US and British forces concentrated in Baghdad and surrounding areas.
But Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat, lashed out at the administration for not pressing the United Nations and NATO to take part in building military security in Iraq, where US troops are being killed and wounded in daily attacks.
"The whole world has a stake in the stability of Iraq," Mr Levin said. "It is a mystery to me why apparently we have not reached out to NATO and to the United Nations as institutions."