The Archbishop of Canterbury has attacked the British Prime Minister Tony Blair's handling of the war in Iraq, accusing him of damaging his country's "political health".
A government which "habitually ignored expert advice...repressed criticism (and) manipulated public media" risked jeopardising "its claim to obedience", Dr Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans, said in a sermon published on Wednesday.
"We face a general weakening of trust in the political system of our nation," he said in a carefully worded sermon which did not mention Blair or Iraq by name.
"There were things government believed it knew and claimed to know on a privileged basis which, it emerged, were anything but certain."
Blair's decision to back the US-led war on Iraq has been savaged by former government ministers, political opponents and former chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix following the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Iraq's alleged weapons programme was the main Anglo-American motive for the war.
Williams's outspoken comments will pile more pressure on Blair, whose approval ratings slumped over the Iraq war and who now faces the biggest gamble of his political career with a referendum on an EU constitution.
The archbishop, appointed on Blair's recommendation in 2002, suggested the government, Washington's staunchest ally in Iraq, rushed to join the U.S.-led war without knowing all the facts.
"Part of the continuing damage to our political health in this country has to do with a sense of the events of the last year on the international scene being driven by something other than attention," Williams said.
"Claims on our political loyalty have something to do with a demonstrable attention to truth, even unwelcome truth. Obedience to a complex truth suffered from a sense of urgency," Williams said in the sermon, delivered on Tuesday and published in the Times on Wednesday.
The archbishop's comments come at a bad time for Blair.
With a general election likely in 2005, he is struggling to recover the popular support he enjoyed when he first swept to power with a big majority in 1997.
Blair's announcement on Tuesday that Britain will hold a public vote on the EU constitution could threaten his political future and endanger the treaty itself.
A poll on Wednesday in the eurosceptic Sun said 97 percent of its readers would reject the constitution.
Williams, 53, has courted controversy in the past.
The father-of-two called the US-led bombing of Afghanistan "morally tainted" and described war in Iraq as "deeply disturbing". He has defended homosexuals in the church and the promotion of women bishops.