The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said late Tuesday that Britain and the United States were wrong to assert their own morality as justification for the decision to launch war against Iraq.

"No government can simply be judge in its own case," Williams, spiritual head of the world's 70 million Anglicans, said in a lecture at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London.

"If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person...It purports to be judge of its own interest," said Williams. He had made a detailed case against the use of the "just war" theory to justify the American and British case for going war with Iraq.

In his lecture, Williams also urged the United States to recognize that terrorists can "have serious moral goals".

While terrorism must always be condemned, it was wrong to assume its perpetrators were "devoid of political rationality", Williams said.

"It is possible to use unspeakably wicked means to pursue an aim that is shared by those who would not dream of acting in the same way, an aim that is intelligible or desirable," William argued.

In ignoring this, America "loses the power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality," he added.

William was among the Church leaders in England who made clear in the run-up to the conflict that the Iraq war did not fulfill the criteria for a just war,

In February, he issued a joint statement with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, calling for continued weapons inspections in Iraq and giving a warning of the "unpredictable humanitarian and political consequences" of a war.

(Xinhua News Agency October 15, 2003)