WASHINGTON, Aug 7: The anti-war movement in the US enters a new phase on Tuesday when voters in Connecticut will decide whether to punish or spare former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman for supporting the war in Iraq.

And in Crawford, Texas, protesters gathered outside President George W. Bush’s ranch to urge him to end violence in the Middle East as the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah intensifies.

In Connecticut’s state primary election, Mr Lieberman, a three-term senator and his party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000, lags behind a political newcomer Ned Lamont because of widespread anti-war sentiments in the state.

Mr Lamont — a multimillionaire cable executive — says he decided to contest the veteran politician in the Democratic primary because he voted for sending troops to Iraq. Recent public opinion polls show Mr Lamont with a lead of 10 to 13 percentage points over Mr Lieberman.

Forced to defend his position, Mr Lieberman told Connecticut voters that while he believed his vote to authorize the war in 2002 was correct, he now felt a “heavy responsibility” to end the war quickly. He said he wanted to withdraw American troops “as fast as anyone,” yet insisted that leaving Iraq now would be a “disaster” that could worsen the sectarian violence there.

And this is the dilemma that confronts many Democratic Party politicians. Many of them feel that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is not possible but also know that this is what their voters want.

The issue is expected to dominate the mid-term elections in November, when half of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives go to polls, and during the 2008 presidential race.

While Mr Lieberman faces a particularly perilous challenge from his anti-war Democratic challenger, other Democratic senators up for re-election are facing questions and some criticism about where they have stood, and stand now, on the Iraq war.

As Mr Lieberman struggles for survival, an anti-war protester who lost her son in Iraq is turning up the heat on President Bush. Fresh from meeting Iraqi opposition figures in Jordan, Cindy Sheehan was back in Mr Bush’s backyard on Sunday, hoping to tell him in person to call US forces home.

Ms Sheehan, who met President Bush once shortly after her son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, has now purchased a piece of land near his ranch for continuing her anti-war campaign.

“I’m going to go up there again … and ask for a meeting with George Bush. I think it would be neighbourly if he met with his new neighbour,” she said.

Ms Sheehan, who travelled to Jordan on August 2, said that she met there several politicians opposed to the Iraqi prime minister. “We met with Iraqi parliamentarians, elected officials, who have peace plans and goals that they want to accomplish in Iraq, and all of them said the occupation is the cause of the problem and the occupation has to end,” she said.

Ms Sheehan had a message for some Crawford residents who resent her taking over a roughly five-acre plot and say she misled the previous owner by having a third party purchase the land.

“If they can’t put up with our presence for a few weeks, when our soldiers and the people of Iraq are suffering constantly because of what our other neighbour George Bush did, then I think they just need to relax a little bit and learn to live with us,” she said.