Two senior British church leaders have criticised the British Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war in Iraq, with one bishop saying he and US President George W. Bush 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 tumbled over the invasion of Iraq.
The Archbishop of York, 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 fallen dictator 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 Timesnewspaper.
Archbishop Hope urged churchgoers to pray for Blair, and said he and Mr Bush should remember they will one day answer to God.
"I want to say . . . that there is a higher authority before whom one day we all have to give an account," he said.
The Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, was scathing about Blair's military alliance with Bush in Iraq. He likened them to a pair of mavericks fighting crime in multi-racial 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 Independentnewspaper.
"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."
Bishop Wright said the religious conservatives surrounding Bush espouse "a very strange distortion of Christianity" while the fact "some of them stand to benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq" made their motives suspicious.
Former Cabinet minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the war, today said London and Washington had opened the door to terror groups in Iraq.
"Far from being a victory in the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq has been a spectacular own goal, as our intelligence services accurately warned," he said.