WASHINGTON, Feb 10: A former CIA official, responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 Western agencies working there, has accused the Bush administration of misusing intelligence to justify invading the country.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000-05, also said the administration ignored warnings that Iraq could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

In an article he wrote for the Foreign Affairs journal, Mr Pillar acknowledged US intelligence agencies’ mistakes in concluding that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But, he said those misjudgements did not drive the administration’s decision to invade.

“If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication,” Mr Pillar wrote, “it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.”

But the Bush administration “went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq,” he said.

Regretting that “official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions,” the former CIA official said that intelligence was misused publicly to “justify decisions already made, damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized.”