SANTIAGO (Chile), Aug 8: The Harvard academic who has predicted a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam warned on Wednesday against a US invasion of Iraq.

Samuel Huntington, a political scientist who is influential in US conservative circles, also criticized Washington’s support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians.

“I don’t think a military invasion would be at all desirable, I think it would cause great upheavals in the Middle East,” Huntington told Reuters in Chile.

“But unless there is some other way of bringing about a regime change, that means Saddam Hussein will remain in power,” he said after a speech at a Chilean university.

Huntington has been accused in the Muslim world of stirring anti-Islamic sentiment with his 1993 thesis that Islam was on a collision course with Western society. He published a book on the same theme in 1996.

His warning on Iraq came amid pressures on the Bush administration from Europe and the Arab world not to launch an attack in an attempt to carry out the official US policy of a “regime change” in Baghdad.

President George W. Bush on Wednesday promised to be patient and consult with Congress and US allies over how to deal with Iraq, which Washington accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting “terrorism.”

Huntington, in Chile to inaugurate a university chair in political science said that although an invasion of Iraq would be unwise, the idea that Saddam must leave office was widely accepted.

“I think everyone in the United States would support that goal and so does just about everybody in Europe and, at least privately, most of the Arab governments in the Middle East. The question is, how do you achieve that?” he said.

He offered no concrete proposal to remove Saddam.

Huntington called on Washington to be more even handed in dealing with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

“I think the United States should pursue a more balanced policy with respect to Israel and the Palestinians,” said Huntington, a member of the US National Security Council in 1977 and 1978.

“Israel has been pursuing a military occupation of Palestinian territory now for many decades and that has to come to an end,” said.

Palestinian Cabinet ministers headed on Wednesday for Washington for the first high-level US-Palestinian meeting since June. Huntington said talk of Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States was “overstated.”

News organizations in the United States reported that a top Pentagon advisory panel had received a briefing depicting the Gulf kingdom as a backer of terrorism.—Reuters