WASHINGTON, June 1: The Pentagon on Saturday issued its own version of the deputy defence secretary’s interview which caused shock and dismay across the US by saying that the US invaded Iraq not for finding weapons of mass destruction but because it wanted to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia.

In an interview to be published in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as saying that a “huge” reason for the invasion was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

“For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” Mr Wolfowitz said.

“Almost unnoticed but huge” was the need to maintain US forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam was in power, he said.

Some of the quotations in the Vanity Fair article differ from the version offered by the Pentagon, which suggested that Mr Wolfowitz meant to say that withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was an important outcome of the invasion, not an important reason for it.

Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, the US announced that it was removing most of its 5,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and would set up its main command centre in Qatar. Mr Wolfowitz’s interview has reignited criticism of the decision to invade Iraq. “It leaves the world with one question: what should we believe,” said former Danish foreign minister Niels Helveg Petersen.

A German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said the comments showed the United States was losing the battle for credibility. “The charge of deception is inescapable.”

The UAE’s Gulf News said the US and the UK “appear to have misled the world with their claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction”.