Defense Minister Robert Hill told the The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that the Australian government joined the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq in March in the belief the regime of Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons.

"On the basis of what we understood, the action was the right action to take," Hill said.

"If it turns out there were flaws in what we understood, then I think we ought to say there were flaws. But it's too early to say that," he said.

Hill admitted that the Australian government did not have any corroborating evidence of its own to justify its claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"We do need to establish the full picture because it's important as we move on to learn all that there is to learn from this experience, including the intelligence side," Hill said.

Both the US and British governments -- Australia's partners in the so-called "coalition of the willing" which toppled Saddam's regime -- are facing allegations they invaded Iraq under false pretences.

The failure of coalition troops to find hard evidence that Iraq still possessed biological, chemical or nuclear weapons prior to the invasion has proved embarrassing for conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Howard defied broad public opposition to joining the war in Iraq by arguing that Saddam's posession of banned weapons and his ties to global terrorism posed a direct threat to Australia.

No clear evidence of such links to terrorism have surfaced in Iraq.

Reports from Washington over the weekend said members of President George W. Bush's administration distorted intelligence reports about Iraq's banned weapons to press for war.

The case against Iraq was based largely on assumptions rather than hard evidence, Newsweek reported, citing unnamed administration and intelligence officials.

The newsweekly said Secretary of State Colin Powell suspected officials had "cherry-picked" information that supported the administration's point of view to justify the military option.

Time magazine quoted a senior military officer saying, "There was a predisposition in this administration to assume the worst about Saddam."

"They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," he said.

An unnamed Army intelligence officer blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the tendency.

"Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence," the officer told Time.

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