General John Abizaid, currently deputy chief of Central Command, said US commanders fully expected to encounter chemical weapons when they crossed a so-called "red line" around Baghdad.

But no chemical nor biological weapons have been found since the war started on March 9, either deployed with Iraqi forces or in depots, Abizaid told a senate hearing to confirm him to succeed General Tommy Franks as head of Central Command.

Abizaid said overall the intelligence for the campaign "was the most accurate that I have ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I've ever seen on the operational level, and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction."

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction -- the main US rationale for invading Iraq -- has confronted the administration with growing questions over whether the government exaggerated evidence to help make the US case for war.

"I firmly believe that there was no distortion of the intelligence," Abizaid said. "I really believe that the intelligence community did their best to give us their best judgement about what they thought, and that's what happened."

"That we didn't get it completely right is what I consider to be a fact," he said.

The general expressed confidence that current efforts in Iraq would expose the deception of the Saddam Hussein regime and lead to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction. But he said it would take time.

In other respects, the US forces had a highly accurate intelligence picture of what they would find on the battlefield, including where the main battles would be fought, against what units and their exact placement, the general said.

"Never before have we had such a complete picture of enemy tactical dispositions and intentions," Abizaid said. "I think largely the speed of the campaign was incredibly enabled by the complete picture we had of the enemy on the battlefield."

"But it is perplexing to me, senator, that we have not found weapons of mass destruction when the evidence was so pervasive that it would exist,' he said.

He said commanders had indications from intelligence that Iraq was getting ready to distribute chemical weapons to forward Republican Guard artillery units as US forces crossed the red line south of Baghdad from Al Kut to Karbala and Al Amarrah.

"So we really targeted those artillery units, in particular, very, very hard," he said.

Abizaid acknowledged it was possible that the Iraqi military was caught completely off guard by the speed of the US advance.

"But I believe that if we had interrupted the movement of chemical weapons from the depots to the guns, that we would have found them in the depots. But we've looked in the depots, and they're not there," he said.

"So the question is, at what point did the government of Iraq make some decision to move its weapons and hide its weapons somewhere or destroy them?" he said

"Before the war, we picked up movement at the depots that we thought meant that they were certainly moving things forward for use in military operations. It may very well have been that they had received the order quite to the contrary, to get rid of them," he said.

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