WASHINGTON, July 27: US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Sunday defended the invasion of Iraq as an example of how the United States had to be prepared to act on “murky intelligence” in its war on terrorism.

Wolfowitz was asked in several television interviews about widespread criticism that Washington’s rationale for the war — charges that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was collaborating with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group — appeared to have been built on shaky foundations. No such weapons have been found and little concrete evidence has been presented of a link.

“The nature of terrorism is that intelligence about terrorism is murky,” Wolfowitz said on Fox News Sunday.

“I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you’re not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you’re going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country,” he added

“If in 2001, or in 2000 or in 1999 we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden and we had tried to say ‘It’s because he’s planning to kill 3,000 people in New York,’ people would have said ‘Well you don’t have any proof of that’,” Wolfowitz said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme.

“The lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can’t wait until proof after the fact.” Wolfowitz said it was wrong to think the US could have continued a policy of containment against Iraq instead of going to war.

“Twelve years of containment was a terrible price for us,” he said, citing the attacks on the USS Cole off the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000 and on the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

He said the Americans killed in those attacks were in the region as part of efforts to contain Iraq, and noted that their presence was one of Osama’s main anti-US grievances.—Reuters