"Based on all the information we have to date, I believe we were right to take action, and America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison," Bush said in a hastily announced prepared statement as he departed the White House.

"He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction, and he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies," Bush said as he left on a campaign swing.

The surprise remarks were Bush's first reaction to the report by the chief US weapons hunter in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, who found that Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War defeat and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed."

That conclusion, combined with other official probes that found no evidence of cooperation between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, have left the two pillars of the White House's case for war in ruins.

Bush's Democratic rival in the November 2 election, John Kerry, seized on those comments and Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Duelfer's report actually reinforced the case for war as the basis for a fresh attack.

"The president of the United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq," he said at a campaign stop in Colorado.

Courting voters in Wisconsin, Bush countered that Kerry had cited fears of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when he voted in late 2002 in favor of legislation authorizing the war.

In the runup to the March 2003 invasion, Bush charged that Saddam had vast arsenals of chemical and biological weapons and could decide "on any given day" to hand them to the terrorists who had carried out the September 11, 2001 strikes.

"Much of the accumulated body of 12 years of our intelligence and that of our allies was wrong, and we must find out why and correct the flaws," the president acknowledged at the White House.

Faced with growing public skepticism about the war with less than four weeks before the November 2 election, Bush and top aides seized on Duelfer's finding that Saddam hoped to pick up his quest for weapons of mass destruction once global sanctions on his regime vanished.

The report "raises important new information about Saddam Hussein's defiance of the world, and his intent and capability to develop weapons," the president said in his brief, somber remarks.

"The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the UN oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions.

"He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away," said Bush.

Duelfer reported that Saddam's government targeted politicians and leading figures in France, Russia and other countries with millions of dollars in lucrative oil export vouchers to win their help in lifting UN sanctions.

While the Iraqi intelligence service tried to bribe many foreign nationals, it paid particular attention to France and Russia because the two countries hold permanent seats on the UN Security Council.

But Duelfer's report said the Baghdad regime's main fear was neighboring Iran, although it "had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions."

"Saddam Hussein was a unique threat: A sworn enemy of our country, a state sponsor of terror, operating in the world's most volatile region. In the world after September 11, he was a threat we had to confront. And America and the world are safer for our actions," said Bush.

Duelfer, in testimony before a Senate panel on Wednesday, said if there was any risk posed by Saddam it was years in the future, far from the immediate danger Bush insisted the Iraqi leader posed in building the case for war.

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