TORONTO, Aug 6: Former US president Bill Clinton on Thursday accused President George Bush's administration of contracting out US security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan, in its zeal to invade Iraq.

Though he didn't mention Mr Bush by name, Bill Clinton, on a book tour in Canada, said the Iraq invasion had drained resources that could have been better spent chasing the suspected mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

"We will never know if we could have gotten him (Osama bin Laden), because we didn't make it a priority," Mr Clinton said in an interview with CBC television. Bill Clinton, who is supporting Democratic Senator John Kerry in the Nov 2 election, said that at the time of the Iraq invasion, Saddam Hussein was only Washington's number five security threat.

"Why did we put our number one security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis with us playing the supporting role and put all our military resources into Iraq which was I think at best our number five security threat?" asked Mr Clinton.

"How did we get to the point where we have 130,000 troops in Iraq and 15,000 in Afghanistan?" Bill Clinton said other top security threats after the Sept 11 attacks on which the Bush administration should have concentrated were the Middle East, the Pakistan-India conflict, and North Korea's nuclear programme.

He asked whether, "as a military proposition it was wise to make all these commitments in Iraq and in effect contract our security out to the Pakistanis in Afghanistan and with (Osama) bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which is unquestionably what has happened".

Mr Clinton also said that, had he been president during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix told him Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he would have sided with Mr Blix in the face of US intelligence data to the contrary. "It is not a question of believing him over US intelligence agencies, but the intelligence was ambiguous on the point, really." -AFP