IRAQ: Two British church leaders have criticised the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, for going to war in Iraq, with one saying he and President George Bush had acted like "a bunch of white vigilantes".
Their criticism, plus an embarrassing contradiction over weapons of mass destruction by the US administrator of Iraq at the weekend, comes at the end of a miserable year for Mr Blair, whose popularity has fallen over the invasion of Iraq.
The Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, who is the Church of England's second most senior churchman, said Mr Blair had displayed "a real lack of listening" over Iraq, and his claims of Saddam Hussein's arms capability remained unproven.
"Undoubtedly a very wicked leader has been removed, but there are wicked leaders in other parts of the world," he added in an interview with the Times newspaper.
Dr Hope urged churchgoers to pray for Mr Blair, and said he and President Bush should remember they would one day answer to God.
The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, was scathing about Mr Blair's military alliance with the US in Iraq. He likened them to a pair of mavericks fighting crime in multiracial inner-city London.
"For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing. This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it," he told the Independent newspaper.
"The world now needs a UN army in the way that Britain 200 years ago needed to turn its bands of militia in each town into a national police force."
Dr Wright said the religious conservatives surrounding Mr Bush espoused "a very strange distortion of Christianity" while the fact that some of them stood to benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq made their motives suspect.