"The bottom line is this: The president made the right decision," Powell said.

"There should be no doubt in the mind of the American people or anyone else in the world that we have done the right thing, and history will certainly be the test of that," he told reporters at the State Department.

Powell's comments came in response to questions about a report published earlier Tuesday in The Washington Post newspaper, in which he was quoted as saying he did not know whether he would have supported the invasion had he known Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

In an apparent bid to soften the impact of the Post report, Powell said the war was just even without the discovery of such arms because now-ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein still wanted them.

"What I know now is that we were dealing with a despotic regime that had the intention to develop weapons of mass destruction, had weapons of mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction and had never lost the intention to have such weapons," he said.

"What I know now -- and nothing would have changed this -- is that they had the capability and were maintaining that capability by keeping the technical infrastructure in place, making sure they had people around who knew how to make such weapons," Powell said.

"They had the wherewithal to make such weapons."

In the interview with the Post, which appeared nearly a year to the day after he made the US case for war in a crucial speech to the UN Security Council, Powell was quoted as saying he wasn't sure if he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq in light of the failure to find stockpiles of banned weapons.

"I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world."

He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."

But in his comments to reporters at the State Department, Powell said he remained confident of the decision to go to war.

"The right thing was done," he said. "Other information that might have been available earlier, I don't know (if that would) have changed the outcome, nor did I say it would have changed the outcome."

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