President Bush has admitted for the first time that his decision to go to war in Iraq was based on faulty intelligence. But he still said that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein had been "the right one".

Mr Bush said that tomorrow's parliamentary elections in Iraq are a watershed moment that will inspire democracy across the Middle East.

But with public opinion still running against his mission, the President still was left defending his decision to go to war nearly three years ago.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," he told a foreign policy forum on the eve of elections to establish Iraq’s first permanent, democratically elected government.

"And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that."

"We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of brutal dictator," he said.

"It is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in his place.

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," the President told the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.

Most Americans see progress on establishing democracy in Iraq, but they are less optimistic about efforts to prevent a civil war and reduce the number of civilian casualties, polling found.

Fifty six per cent said they thought progress is being made in the establishment of democracy, but almost as many 53 per cent said that they thought the United States was losing ground in reducing civilian casualties, according to the poll by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.

Mr Bush’s speech is the fourth tackling the US role in Iraq.

In a speech on Monday he offered his view straightforwardly that 30,000 Iraqis "more or less" had died "in the initial incursion and in the ongoing violence against Iraqis".

In previous speeches, he has admitted that reconstruction efforts were too ambitions and that the US would have done better to work on small, local projects that were less vulnerable to sabotage, he said. It was now doing this.

But Mr Bush has stapled all these admissions to an emphatic statement that he did the right thing in going to war. On Monday, answering a question, he said "Knowing what I know now, I would make the same decision to invade.

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