IRAQ: US arms expert Dr David Kay, in an interim report to Congress, admitted yesterday that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found in Iraq by his 1,200-member team.
The admission, made behind closed doors, came as the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, announced that a revised American text for a new resolution on Iraq had been distributed to the UN Security Council.
"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Dr Kay said in a statement.
The team has also not found any evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that Iraqi military was prepared to use chemical warfare against US-led forces.
Dr Kay's report comes as scepticism grows in the US over Bush administration's claims about the danger Saddam Hussein posed before the war in April. In an exercise in damage limitation, US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld told Pentagon correspondents that the Kay report was "preliminary" and that US experts in Iraq still have a lot of work to do. However, he took a side swipe at intelligence gathering, indicating that the Bush administration will lay the blame on the intelligence community rather than its own interpretation of intelligence. If intelligence was off by a lot, Mr Rumsfeld said, "then that would be unfortunate."
The work by Dr Kay's 1,200-strong Iraq Survey Group has cost $300 million to date and the arms expert is pitching for an additional $600 million to continue the search. Some Democrats claimed this was an expensive way of putting off the inevitable conclusion - that there are no unconventional arms stocks to be found. The joint leaders of the House Intelligence Committee last week wrote to the CIA, criticising pre-war intelligence on weapons and Iraqi links to al-Qaeda as "uncertain", "not concrete" and "fragmentary."
Mr Powell told reporters in Washington yesterday that "we want Iraqis to be in the driver's seat" in Iraq but this would take time and the pace should be determined by the Iraqis themselves. He warned that a hasty transition to civilian rule could produce a "failed state".
The resolution showed the US was "anxious to return full authority to the Iraqi people as quickly as is possible", but ministries and a constitution had to be in place first. The new draft does not set a timetable for the American-led coalition to hand over power within months, as demanded by France. The UN "should strengthen its vital role in Iraq" by helping prepare for elections, Mr Powell said, but it would not be in the driver's seat, rather it would be "in the car as we go down the road". He said it was something of a red herring to say, "Why don't you just solve all of the problems in the world by finding someone in the UN Secretary General's office that you can just hand this to?"