War against Saddam inspired reformers: US

The US military victory against Saddam's regime gets the credit for 'inspiring democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran,' Bush said.

The US military victory against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq gets the credit for "inspiring democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran," President George W Bush said on Saturday.

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"Today, women can vote in Afghanistan, Palestinians are breaking the old patterns of violence, and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are rising up to demand their sovereignty and democratic rights," Bush said in a weekly radio address that marked the two-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

"These are landmark events in the history of freedom," he said.

With his primary rationale for the war - Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction - discredited, Bush has turned to the argument that the war in Iraq was justified because it freed the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and now gives the Middle East a model for democracy.

Bush said "the Iraqi people are taking charge of their own destiny," citing the country's first free and fair elections in its modern history, this week's first meeting of the Transitional National Assembly and the upcoming drafting of a constitution for a "free and democratic Iraq."

Against that progress, insurgents have carried on a relentless campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings while rampant crime, power outages, unemployment over 50 per cent and a fuel crisis in one of the world's prime oil-exporting countries continues.