WASHINGTON - The United States has stopped searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - one of its key reasons for invading the country - and a report saying there are no such weapons to find there will likely stand, the White House confirmed Wednesday.
However, US President George W. Bush, who issued dire warnings about Iraq's WMD capability prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, said the Iraq war had been "absolutely" worth fighting.
"Like many, many here in the United States, many around the world, the United Nations thought he had weapons of mass destruction, and so, therefore, one, we need to find out what went wrong in the intelligence gathering. Saddam was dangerous. And .. the world was safer without him in power," Bush said, according to excerpts released from an ABC television interview.
Asked whether it had been worth invading Iraq even without WMD found, Bush replied, "Oh, absolutely."
Bush made his comments on the ABC News 20/20 program.
Separately, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that for the Iraq Survey Group, which was leading the search for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, "a lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."
McClellan said a report authored by the survey group's head, Charles Duelfer, which is to be released to the US Congress in the coming weeks, will be similar to a September draft in which he said there were no such weapons.
"Duelfer is continuing to wrap things up at this point. ... My understanding is that it is not going to fundamentally alter the findings of his earlier report," McClellan said.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended before Christmas.
Duelfer's report to Congress said that deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had the intent but not the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.
The report contradicted the US government's chief publicly stated reason for overthrowing Saddam's regime.
McClellan recalled that President Bush decided in October, after Duelfer's first report, to revamp US intelligence operations.
"The president made it clear back in October that we need to make sure that we get the best possible intelligence," McClellan said. "We had a 12-year accumulated body of evidence we had, and our allies had, that was wrong, and we must correct the flaws."
A US official said that ISG inspectors who are located "somewhere" in the Middle East were examining thousands of documents.
"If there are any leads, these leads will be pursued," the official said.
Reacting to the news of the inspection's end, the Democrats' leader in Congress's House of Representatives blasted Bush's Iraq policy.
"President Bush has refused to concede what has been obvious for months - the primary justification for the invasion of Iraq was not supported by fact," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
"Now that the search is finished, President Bush needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong, for so long, about the reasons for war."
A fellow Democrat, Senator Ted Kennedy, echoed Pelosi's criticism.
"This has just turned into a quagmire. This is George Bush's Vietnam," he told MSNBC. "We haven't held one person accountable for the mistakes that we've got in Iraq, not one person. And I think the American people want to know why."
But Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, a former presidential candidate, defended the war, saying it was justified despite the failure to find weapons in Iraq.
"The fact that we didn't discover large stocks of weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean that Saddam Hussein didn't have them," Lieberman told Fox News television.
He added that, in his view, it seemed likely that the deposed Iraqi leader had planned to develop banned weapons in due time.
Blair blasts Britons over Iraq war