After months of critical comment from church leaders across the world and in the US, the Bush administration has at last won the support of one religious group for its Iraq policy.
The 16 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention, the fundamentalist Bible Christians of the southern states, has backed the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein's regime by force.
Richard Land, president of the convention's ethics and religious liberty commission, said: "It would be a strategic and sizable blow to terrorism to remove [Saddam's] Hitleresque administration from power. It would suggest to Iranians, Saudis and Syrians that they too could have such a government of the people, by the people and for the people."
He added: "The US should not sit idly by waiting for her allies in Europe to indicate their support ... no offence intended but we have had to extricate the Europeans from conflagrations of their own making twice in the last century."
However, the Rev David Coffey, general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, told the Baptist Times: "A pre-emptive strike against the sovereign territory of another country is an appallingly dangerous course of action to take."