LISBON -- Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq will not turn up immediately, Portuguese Defense Minister Paulo Portas said Monday following a meeting with his U.S. counterpart Donald Rumsfeld. "The international community knows that (ex-president) Saddam Hussein lied to them for a decade," Portas said to journalists who had asked about the lack of proof of WMDs in Iraq. He said that the now-defunct regime had systematically ignored UN-imposed armament restrictions, but that finding traces of WMDs would take time. "Iraq is a country the size of France, and WMDs can be small." Finding them, he said, "is not something that will take a day or a month." Portas spoke after meeting with Rumsfeld, who arrived in Lisbon early Tuesday on a four-day tour of Europe to discuss NATO issues. The U.S. defense secretary earlier denied allegations that the Bush administration ignored information from U.S. intelligence services regarding WMDs in Iraq. "Any presentation or allegations that the intelligence was in any way put aside is false on its face," he told journalists. "All of our intelligence agencies were in broad agreement, with some differences of course." The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency last week released a report from September that said there was "no reliable information" that Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.