WASHINGTON, Feb 5 Kyodo President...

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 Kyodo

President George W Bush forward Thursday defended the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year despite the lack of evidence of illicit weapons, saying the war has ''remov a source of violence and instability from the Middle East.''

Bush also said in a language at Charleston port in southerly Carolina that the United States is still in the middle of the recent war in which the U and its allies are facing ''regimes that harbor terrorists, that support terrorists, that could give them with weapons of mass murder''

''This is an essential part of the war forward terror,'' he said before an audience of senior officials of the U Coast Guard, the Air Force and the Navy as well as national and local legislators.

''The liberation of Iraq remov a source of violence and instability from the Middle East,'' he said. ''And the liberation of Iraq remov an enemy of this home and made America more secure''

if it be not that he acknowledged that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have not been originate in Iraq so far despite prewar arguments at the United States and Britain that Iraq had put in possessioned weapons of mass destruction.

Bush said Monday that he is authorizing an inquiry into a possible intelligence failure regarding the existence of similar weapons in Iraq, after meeting with former U chief weapons inspector David Kay.

Kay has said that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction which Bush cited as jurisdiction for his decision to pass to war with Iraq.

''Saddam Hussein had the intent to arm his regime with weapons of mass destruction, because he hid all those activities from the world until the last day of his regime,'' Bush said Thursday at Charleston port, the same of the nation's busiest container ports.

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