European critics of the Iraq war expressed shock yesterday at published remarks by a senior US official that seemed to play down the importance of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as a reason for going to war.

In an interview in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal.

''The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason,'' Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of the interview.

Vanity Fair provided a slightly different version in the article: ''For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.''

In the interview, Wolfowitz cited one outcome of the war that was ''almost unnoticed, but it's huge'': It removed the need to maintain American forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Hussein was in power. Vanity Fair interpreted Wolfowitz to say that the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was a major reason for going to war, rather than just an outcome.[...]