John Howard has been a staunch ally of the US

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has defended the decision to send troops to Iraq as doubts grow over the accuracy of pre-war intelligence reports.

In an interview with ABC radio, Mr Howard said he was confident Australia was right to back the war.

"I am utterly firm in my view that we took the right decision, and nothing, frankly, is going to alter that view," he said.

You act according to the information you have available to you at the time John Howard

He also dismissed the relevance of doubts over the accuracy of pre-war intelligence reports.

"You act according to the information you have available to you at the time," he said.

He said that "overwhelmingly, although there was an Australian contribution at various points, overwhelmingly the raw intelligence that was assessed by our agencies came from British and American sources."

Opposition

The opposition Labor Party's foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said that the prime minister needed to answer some important questions.

"It's time for John Howard to be man enough to face the Australian parliament and people and tell them now why he believes he may well have got those reasons for going to war wrong," he said.

The so far unspoken question is starting to shift towards whether the prime minister risked the lives of young Australian soldiers lightly ABC radio reporter

Some opposition MPs have also called for an independent inquiry into the information used to justify going to war, claiming that the parliamentary investigation currently under way will be biased in Mr Howard's favour.

An ABC radio reporter noted that "the so far unspoken question is starting to shift towards whether the prime minister risked the lives of young Australian soldiers lightly".

Press pressure

Australian newspapers noted that the prime minister was now in the same position as the US and UK leaders.

"Political pressure has been building" on Mr Howard as well as US President George Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Melbourne's The Age reported.

Correspondent Louise Dodson noted that Mr Howard had "conceded... that Australians may have been sent to Iraq on the basis of flawed intelligence" but added that he has said he is "in no hurry" to establish an inquiry along US and UK lines.

Writing in the same paper, Michael Gordon argued that "questions are being asked about how the coalition of the willing got it so wrong - questions that can only be answered by independent inquiries."

Rather than a political plot, perhaps the intelligence services got it badly wrong in the advice they gave The Australian

"George Bush knows it. Tony Blair knows it. But our prime minister's response so far has been to say that almost all the intelligence that came Australia's way... came from the US and Britain."

"This is not a tenable position," he maintained.

Intelligence test

Sydney's The Australian argued that the focus should be not on the politicians, but on the intelligence services.

"Rather than a political plot, perhaps the intelligence services got it badly wrong in the advice they gave," the paper suggested.

"It is the spies who are being interrogated this time," it said.

Gideon Rose, writing in the same newspaper, said "Western experts, it now appears, were misled by a combination of fragmentary evidence, Iraqi deceptions and their own logical but mistaken inferences."

"Yet it is the job of intelligence services," he argued, "to see through such deceptions and accurately assess the true nature of the threats confronting them".

"Given the importance of the question and the vast resources devoted to answering it, this is unquestionably one of the most excruciating intelligence failures in recent decades."

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.