The post-war administration of Iraq has been a "spectacular miscalculation", James Rubin has said.

In an interview with ePolitix.com, Bill Clinton's former US assistant secretary of state said that the situation on the ground in Iraq could cause "real difficulties" for President Bush in the run up to next year's US elections.

And Rubin said that the row over the failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was likely to be more of a problem for Tony Blair than for the American leader.

"I think the real difficulty for the Bush administration on Iraq is not so much on who said what on weapons of mass destruction but rather the spectacular miscalculation on how to run Iraq after the fall of Saddam and the difficulties we've been having there in stabilising the situation and transferring power to the Iraqis," he said.

"And the problem that we weren't perceived as the liberators the way the American people were told. WMD was only one piece of a set of concerns that the American people might have about the war."

Rubin said that in Britain the WMD issue was "much more central to Tony Blair's argument".

And the Hutton inquiry into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly "really wouldn't play particularly...in America", he added.

"I would be surprised if the result of the Hutton inquiry makes people outside Britain regard him [Tony Blair] in a different way," Rubin told this website.

"For example, I would doubt it would have much impact at all on the American people's friendship and respect for him."