"That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people," Blair said in the interview with host Michael Parkinson which will air Saturday night.

Pressed to clarify what he meant, Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."

The words did not sit well with Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, one of the 103 British soldiers to date to have lost their lives in the Iraqi conflict.

"How can he say he is a Christian?" said Gentle, a campaigner with Military Families Against the War.

"A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments."

Reg Keys, the father of a dead soldier, accused Blair of "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure and I find it abhorrent."

His son Lance Corporal Tom Keys was one of six Royal Military policemen killed by an Iraqi mob in Majar al-Kabir in June 2003.

Keys, who stood against the prime minister in the last general election on an anti-war ticket, said Blair's remarks reminded him of US President George W. Bush who was quoted as saying last year that God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

"God and religion have nothing to do with this war," Keys said.

That view was echoed by the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's second opposition party, who said "going to war isn't just an act of faith."

It requires legal analysis and a close look at the consequences, and Blair's "prospectus for military action was flawed," Menzies Campbell said.

Other Liberal Democrats agreed that God should not be part of the equation.

"It is a bizarre and shocking revelation that the prime minister claims to have been guided by the supernatural in this matter, especially given the particular religious sensitivities in the Middle East," said Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat member of parliament from the Oxford area, who is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

"We don't want Bush or Khomeini-type fundamentalism in our politics," he added.

Blair is seen by some as the most religious British premier since William Gladstone (1809-1898), who gave up his vocation as a pastor to enter politics.

Blair's handlers, including his former communications chief Alastair Campbell, have reportedly tried to steer Blair away from references to God, including reputedly removing the phrase "God bless you" from Blair's television address on the outbreak of the Iraq war.

During last year's election campaign, BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked Blair if he prayed with Bush.

Looking decidedly uncomfortable, Blair replied: "No, Jeremy, we don't pray together."

But questions of religion surround Blair. There is speculation he plans to convert from High Church Anglican to Catholicism after leaving office.

Blair's wife Cherie is a strong Catholic and he regularly attends Mass with her and their children at the prime minister's country residence in Chequers.

The Catholic priest of that parish, Timothy Russ, has revealed that Blair asked for advice on moving between the churches.

But Blair says he has no plans to convert and only attends Catholic services so the family can worship together.

© Copyright Agence France-Presse.

The Bush administration and Pentagon have stated repeatedly there is no timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and a U.S. military spokesman repeated that on Saturday.

"We've made no such plans," said Pentagon spokesman Major Paul Swiergosz.

There are currently about 135,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and about 8,500 British troops in Iraq. The full U.S.-led coalition numbers around 160,000. Italy, which has the fourth largest contingent in Iraq, has said it plans to pull out this year.

Britain's Sunday Mirror newspaper also reported on the planned withdrawal saying it would happen within 12 months.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have said frequently in the past that foreign troops will be gradually withdrawn from Iraq once Iraqi security forces are capable of guaranteeing security for the 27 million population.

U.S. and British troops have trained 230,000 Iraqis to take on roles in the police force and a slowly expanding Iraqi army, although both are currently incapable of securing the country on their own.

The U.S. military withdrew around 15,000 troops after Iraq had successful elections in December for its first full-term parliament since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Tensions in Iraq have soared over the past two weeks as fighting between the country's main Muslim sects has intensified.

There is also an on-going two-year-old insurgency being waged by militants against the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, its security forces and foreign troops.

The recent sectarian violence has provoked fears that the country is on the brink of civil war, a scenario that could greatly complicate the role of foreign troops.

However, the Telegraph, quoting a defense official, said that if civil war were to break out, it would likely cause the withdrawal plan to be put off.

Wednesday is International Women's Day. It will be marked by thousands of petitions for peace, to be handed in at US embassies across the world. Such pleas have rarely looked more hopeless. Hundreds lie dead after the bombing of the golden mosque at Samarra. The old conflict, a daily toll of death and suffering, may soon be swept away by new variant civil meltdown. From Burnley to Baghdad, women warned of this. Obviously, millions of men did so, too, but female opponents outnumbered male ones in Britain, and their Iraqi counterparts faced the hideous fate always meted out to the women and children of war.

It was not that they had prospered under Saddam Hussein and UN sanctions. In Basra, in 2002, 25 out of the 26 obstetrics and gynaecology students were women. Yet their patients were weak and sick, and one in eight of the babies they delivered would not see their fifth birthday.

Grief is more random now. A week ago today, a group of Iraqi mothers watched their teenage sons leave for a game of football. They never saw them again, unless you count a morgue visit to identify body parts scraped from a bombed pitch. Other women will struggle to be heard on Wednesday. Sharia law, they say, has pushed a once-secular society back into a medieval world. Honour killings, beheadings, forced veiling, rape, acid attacks and sexual servitude are a part of everyday life. So are power cuts, dead phone lines, ruptured fuel supplies and no food because the markets are shut and silent.

This time three years ago, the planet echoed to the testosteronic din of men marching to war. The UN said no, but God said yes. Politicians bought the neocon fairy tale that totalitarian regimes would collapse into dust, allowing westernised democracies to spring up in their place. Women, and less credulous men, were not so eager to believe that the God-given goodness of America and Britain trumped law and logic. Nor could they grasp how attacking nation states wipes out stateless terror.

The noise has turned to purdah. When 60 people died in a single day last week, newspapers and TV networks barely mentioned it. Incipient civil meltdown, insurgency and a more powerful Iran, intent on getting a nuclear bomb, attract hardly more coverage than a prize dahlia contest at a village fete. Iraq was the prototype of the sitting-room war, in which all would be seen, 24/7, and all explained. But the chloroform rag of boredom, embarrassment or hopelessness prevailed. We are all anaesthetised now.

In that vacuum, the voice of women has not died. Last week, the families of 18 servicemen killed in Iraq delivered a petition to an absent Prime Minister. Tony Blair was not on the runway to meet the flag-draped coffins of their children, nor available at Number 10. Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son, Gordon, is among the dead, had received a personally signed letter saying: 'I am afraid a meeting with you will not be possible.'

Another mother, Pauline Hickey, sent her own begging note, imploring Mr Blair to bring the troops home. 'We have lost 103 dedicated soldiers,' she wrote. 'They died in a war based on lies, for nothing.'

British and American armed services are never going to end the insurgency fomented by the war they fought. Most Iraqis say they want them gone. The test is whether than an exit is more likely to unleash civil war or forestall it. Iraq's elected leaders still mostly want troops to stay, but the case is getting weaker. My friend in Baghdad says coalition soldiers are a spectral presence, never at the trouble spots. So what are they there for?

In other respects, Britain has already walked away. Conflict, when it is discussed at all, revolves round us: our civil liberties, our freedom of speech, our rule of law, our consciences, our wish to wash our hands of a country about which we know very little, except that we never wanted to invade it in the first place.

Leave it to the Iraqis, people say. Is that all we have to offer to the thousands of women who mourn their husbands and children in the knowledge that three bitter years may only be a curtain-raiser on the real event?

Either Iraq will implode, in which case neighbour will slaughter neighbour and the impact will open all the fault lines of the Middle East. Or else we look for other solutions, frail as they may seem. Iran, which backs Shia Islam, may not want a civil war, knowing the most likely conflict is a three-way Shia clash between the movement's major factions and their militias. There is still scope for a government of national unity, if the Shia majority that won January's elections offers more power to the Sunni minority. Obviously, this is Iraq's business, but, given the gallons of blood on Britain's hands, it could at least look interested.

As the anniversary of Shock and Awe approaches, the clamour starts up again. In a flood of books, the impresarios and cheerleaders of war revise their views. Francis Fukuyama declares the end of neoconservatism. Paul Bremer, the US postwar administrator, relives a reign in which he ordered a flat tax of 15 per cent on a country with no taxes.

Here is another narrative. After the war, almost eight million children, many of them girls, went back to school. Attendance rose to 85 per cent at primary school, 4 per cent higher than the regional average, and Unicef was hopeful. Last Friday, the charity found out that 400 schools were being targeted by insurgents intent on slaughtering pupils and their teachers.

On Ministry of Education figures, 64 children have been murdered in the last four months and 57 injured. Remember them on Wednesday. They are the ones failed by military onslaught and by Tony Blair's God. They are also the reminder that those who seek a political solution for Iraq cannot afford to fail.

mary.riddell@observer.co.uk