Attacking Iraq ‘Immoral, Illegal’: Anglican Bishops

LONDON, Aug 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In another serious blow to the anticipated U.S. attack on Iraq, Christian pacifists, in a petition addressed Tuesday, August 6, 2002, to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said such an attack is nothing less than a violation of Christian moral teaching, news agencies reported.

"It is deplorable that the world's most powerful nations continue to regard war and the threat of war as an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, in violation of the ethos of both the United Nations and Christian moral teaching," said the petition circulated by Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was among the 2,500-odd signatories to the petition circulated by Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement.

It was delivered to Downing Street just as a poll for Channel Four television suggested that 52 percent of Britons believed their nation should not take part in a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

U.S. President George W. Bush faces growing opposition to his planned war against Iraq as fellow world leaders, U.S. and British politicians, and religious leaders openly voice there objections.

The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, launched his re-election campaign with an outspoken attack on American “adventures”, while UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, declared that an invasion of Iraq would be unwise.

Pax Christi delivered the petition to Blair's official residence 57 years to the day after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Blair - who supports Bush's desire to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein - was to travel Wednesday, August 7, to the southwest of France for a summer holiday with his family, according to British informed sources, AFP said.

On Monday, August 5, and through his spokeswoman, the British Premier rejected appeals for a special sitting of the House of Commons in September to debate an anticipated U.S. war against Iraq and Britain's role in it.

In its petition, Pax Christi said: "The way to peace does not lie through war but through transformation of structures of injustice and of the politics of exclusion, and that is the cause to which the West should be devoting its technological, diplomatic and economic resources."

Sister Annaliese, of the Anglican Sisters of the Church, part of the delegation that delivered the petition to Downing Street, was more succinct. "The British people do not want war," she said.

Williams, a liberal Welsh theologian, takes over as spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans in October when he succeeds George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury.

He criticized the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and said no U.S.-led assault to oust Saddam should proceed without a UN mandate.

In its opinion poll, taken over the weekend among 1,001 respondents, British Channel Four found that 52 percent felt that Britain should not militarily take part in a U.S. strike on Iraq.

Thirty-four percent were in favor, while 14 percent were undecided.