Topeka ? Failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq represents a “world intelligence community failure,” the chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said Saturday.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he thinks a 300-page report from his committee’s examination of the intelligence gathering before the war with Iraq is nearly done and will become public in March.

During an interview Saturday in Topeka, where he was participating in the Kansas Republican Party’s annual Kansas Day weekend, Roberts said he has concluded that intelligence officers who had been cautious in assessing potential threats before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks became more likely to pass on speculative information afterward.

Intelligence agencies such as the CIA are being criticized for not being cautious enough, Roberts said, when they previously were criticized for being overly cautious. However, he added, “They did not do a very good job.”

“This is symbolic of a world intelligence community failure,” he said. “We have a very systemic problem.”

Roberts made his comments a little more than a week after David Kay resigned as the CIA’s lead weapons inspector. Kay has said he believes Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq was based on inaccurate intelligence.

Roberts said of the faulty intelligence, “That’s global.”

Kay has urged an independent look at the intelligence — an idea that has won support from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and from Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

However, Roberts and some other Republicans have resisted the idea.

Roberts said the committee has learned that agencies relied perhaps too much on “signal” intelligence, from satellites, for example, and not enough on information from agents on the ground.

As for his committee’s report, he said, “We think it will answer a lot of questions.”

Kay has agreed with Republican senators that there is no doubt that Saddam had ambitions to use weapons of mass destruction and had used such weapons in the past. Kay said Saddam had secret weapons development programs that violated U.N. resolutions, and the world is much safer without his government in place.

Roberts said intelligence agencies may have overestimated the threat posed by Saddam while underestimating threats posed by other nations, such as Libya and Syria. However, he said, Saddam’s government destabilized the region and if Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, “He would have reconstituted his program.”