Iraq invasion would not have happened if Bush was not misled on WMD: Aide

Washington, Mar. 5 (ANI): Former President George W Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, has claimed that Bush would not have ordered the invasion of Iraq had he known that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was erroneous.

"Would the Iraq war have occurred without WMD? I doubt it. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam," the Independent quoted Rove, as saying in his memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

While the Rove book is being seen as a staunch defence of the eight years that Bush spent in office, it also confirms that the Iraq war was fought under entirely false pretences.

In his book, Rove admits that failure by the White House to counter the erroneous intelligence claims was "one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years".

The book comes after Blair admitted that he probably would have moved ahead with removing Saddam Hussein from power even had he known that the narrative about weapons of mass destruction was fictional by finding different ways to justify it.

Although not many people will accept the notion that the White House was as out-of-the-loop about the facts on WMD, Rove says that, without the WMD storyline, Bush would surely have backed away from military action even if he, the writer, still believes it would have been justified. (ANI)