"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical, and we are confident that they will be found and discovered and seen," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

As Iraqi television showed a speech by someone who appeared to be Saddam, leading intelligence officials here to think he survived early US air strikes, Fleischer essentially declared the Iraqi leader's fate all but irrelevant.

US President George W. Bush's "definition of victory" is the point at which the regime is disarmed and its hold on power is broken "so the Iraqi people can be free and liberated," the spokesman said.

"So clearly, the future or the fate of Saddam Hussein is a factor, but ... whether he is or is not alive or dead, the mission is moving forward, and the regime's days are numbered," he said.

A US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Saddam seemed to refer in his speech to the downing of an Apache helicopter on March 24, some five days after a US "decapitating" strike aimed at killing him.

"We don't know" if the Iraqi leader is alive, said Fleischer. "In the bigger scheme of things it really doesn't matter, because whether it is him or whether it isn't him, the regime's days are numbered and are coming to an end."

The show of indifference appeared to draw on the tough lesson of the war in Afghanistan, when US forces failed to net or kill Osama bin Laden, the fugitive terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001.

And the White House has always had an elastic definition of the US policy of "regime change" in Iraq, at one point saying that it could be satisfied by Saddam's voluntary disarmament. Iraq denies possessing banned weapons.

Bush launched military action against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam has chemical and biological weapons and seeks nuclear arms, all in violation of a decade of UN disarmament demands.

US-led troops virtually knocking on Saddam's door have yet to locate such weapons of mass destruction, though they have reported finding a suspected "training school" for nuclear, chemical or biological warfare.

And Fleischer trumpeted the renaming of the captured Saddam International Airport as "Baghdad International Airport," predicting that the Iraqi landscape would soon be scrubbed of the Iraqi leader's likeness.

"There's nothing the Iraqi people want more than to throw off the yoke of oppression that Saddam has imposed on them," he said.

"I think that the Iraqis don't want to have Saddam Hussein statues left behind. They don't want Saddam Hussein's torture left behind. They don't want his brutality left behind," the spokesman said.

Fleischer's comments came after the Washington Post reported that the United States plans to declare victory in Iraq in due course, whether or not Saddam and his lieutenants have capitulated or been killed.

US officials do not foresee a surrender similar to Germany's to the Allies at Reims that concluded World War II.

"Rather, they hope to recognize a moment when the military and political balance tilt decisively away from Hussein's Baath Party government," the unnamed senior military officer told the daily.

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