LONDON, Dec 25: The leader of the world's 70 million Anglican Christians, Archbishop Rowan Williams, took Western nations to task on Saturday for neglecting global poverty and "massaging" the threat of terrorism.

Never shy of controversy, Archbishop Williams used his Christmas Day sermon to lambast the rich world for failing to make good progress on the U.N. Millennium development goals.

"The likelihood of a reduction by half of people living in abject poverty by the year 2015 is not noticeably greater than it was four years ago," he said in reference to one of the key goals during his address at Canterbury Cathedral.

"Some developed nations appear deeply indifferent to the goals agreed," he added.

The terrorism threat was a legitimate concern, but was being manipulated by some and had helped sideline poverty issues, Williams argued.

"It is all too easy to be more interested in other matters - not least the profound anxieties about security that are at the moment so pervasive, massaged by various forces in our public life in the West," he said, without elaborating.

Rowan Williams urged Britain to use its leadership of the G8 group of industrialized nations next year to start a new war on poverty.

"ONLY AGENDA IS FEAR": He noted the plethora of ideas floated by British government figures and others to reduce debt, bring down medicine prices, promote grassroots credit schemes, and make trade rules fairer.

"Despite the vision of some in the political world and beyond, the will to take this forward seems to be in short supply," he said, urging Christians to display "generous anger".

One of the most high-profile British critics of the Iraq invasion, the archbishop reminded his listeners of a quote in a recent TV documentary that argued the United States and Britain had deliberately played up security fears to bolster their power.

"When a society believes in nothing, the only agenda is fear," he said, quoting a controversial BBC programme, The Power of Nightmares.

He accepted, however, that serious threats existed.

"No one could or would deny that we face exceptional levels of insecurity and serious problems in relation to an unpredictable and widely diffused network of agencies whose goals are slaughter and disruption," he said.

"It is not a mistake to be concerned about terror; we have seen enough this last year, in Iraq and Ossetia, of the nauseating and conscienceless brutality that is around."

Archbishop Williams's message followed a searing Christmas Eve address by Britain's leading Roman Catholic, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. He asked why so much money was being spent on conflict in the Middle East rather than global poverty.

"What a terrible thing it is that billions - and I mean billions of pounds - are being spent on war in the Middle East which could have been spent bringing people out of dire poverty and malnourishment and disease," he said. -Reuters