Kay warns US against repeating mistakes of Iraq strikes in Iran

"There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding the Iraq war," David Kay, who led the search for banned weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq, said on Monday in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

"Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt," he wrote.

"What is in doubt is the ability (of) the US government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of military action by the United States or Israel," Kay added.

President Bush justified the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam Hussein posed a threat because Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was reviving its nuclear weapons program.

No such weapons were found. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee a year ago that US intelligence was "almost all wrong," and later urged reorganisation of the US intelligence services.

The US government accuses Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear energy programme, a charge Iran denies.