George W. Bush at the White House. (Reuters)

Washington, Jan. 31: President George W. Bush conceded for the first time yesterday that there is a gulf between his pre-war descriptions of Saddam Hussein’s arsenals of banned weapons, and what has been found.

Bush was asked whether he supported calls from senior Democrats and some Republicans for an independent investigation of pre-war intelligence and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Twice ducking the question, Bush said: “I want the American people to know that I too want to know the facts. I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq.”

Although Bush went on to say he remained certain that Saddam Hussein was “a growing danger” to America, his statement was his first admission of a discrepancy between pre-war warnings and the reality on the ground.

David Kay, who resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group last week, has called for an independent inquiry, saying of the intelligence community that “we were almost all wrong” about Iraq.

The White House has been in slow retreat, day-by-day, since Kay announced that he did not believe stockpiles of banned chemical and biological weapons would ever be found in Iraq.

A Republican, Senator John McCain, added his voice to Democratic calls for an inquiry. Other members of the Republican-controlled Congress have vowed to stand by the White House in this election year, and head off such an investigation.

For months after Saddam’s overthrow, Bush insisted that it was “only a matter of time” before WMDs were found. Last June, he went as far as declaring that America had “found” them, referring to two suspected mobile biological weapons laboratories found in northern Iraq.