Former US chief weapons inspector David Kay said Sunday that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush should have been aware before the Iraq war that the weak intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could not prove Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the West.

"I think the prime minister, as, I would say, the US president, should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exit for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction," Kay told Britain's ITV network in an interview.

"WMD was only one (factor for the war) and I think in their mind, not really the most important one," he said.

"And so the doubts about the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was not as serious to them as it seemed to be to the rest of the world," he said.

Kay resigned in January. His conclusion then that Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMD brought serious problems for both Bush and Blair, undercutting their main justification for war.

(Xinhua News Agency July 19, 2004)