December 30, 2003	Tuesday	Ziqa’ad 6, 1424

LONDON, Dec 29: Two British church leaders blasted Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday for invading Iraq, with one bishop saying he and US 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 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” 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.

David Hope urged British churchgoers to pray for Mr 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 Mr Blair’s military alliance with President Bush. 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 The Independent.

“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.”

“STRANGE CHRISTIANITY”: Tom 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.

A survey labelled Mr Blair Britain’s least trustworthy politician.

Former minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the invasion, added to the chorus of criticism on Monday, saying 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.—Reuters