The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has strongly criticised the government's "shortsighted" and "ignorant" policy in Iraq Saturday, the day he ended a three-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Writing in The Times, the Archbishop accused Tony Blair and the US of endangering the lives and futures of thousands of Christians in the Middle East who are stigmatised by their countrymen as supporters of the "crusading West".

He added that one prediction that was systematically ignored was that Western military action would put the whole of the Middle East's Christian population at risk.

Dr Williams went on to condemn the government for failing to devise a strategy to help Christians in the Middle East, where their numbers are in dramatic decline.

"The results are now painfully adding to what was already a difficult situation for Christian communties across the region," he says.

"The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners. It's a very sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region," he said as he noted that extremist attacks were now becoming "notably more frequent" in some Middle Eastern countries where Muslim-Christian relations have been good.

Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, meanwhile, Dr Williams said that in his view there was "no doubt" that life for Christians in Iraq had become more difficult since the invasion.

"What we have seen in the last year or so in Iraq has been attacks on Christian priests, the murder of some Christian priests, and the massive departure of large numbers of Christians from Iraq," he said.

"The situation has got worse since Saddam fell."

He told the Today programme that despite a "traditional co-existence" in Bethlehem there were now "signs there of anti-Christian feeling by local Muslims'.

But a Foreign Office spokesman has rebuked the Archbishop's criticisms. "We disagree with his views. We don't think that it is our policies in Iraq that cause suffering of Christians," he said.

Referring to Iraq, the spokesman said: "We think it is intolerant extremism of people who want to cause pain and suffering and chaos in order to promulgate the societies in which they can impose the way of life they want on people who have clearly voted for democracy and democratic government. It is not our policies, it is those who decide to pursue violence and inflict suffering."

Their targets were "pretty indiscriminate" and included moderate Muslims as well as Christians, he said.

"The only way out of this is for us to work closely with the democratically elected government in Iraq in order to create a society in which the rights of Christians and all are protected. That is exactly the opposite of the society those who inflict the suffering want."

Dr Williams returned yesterday from a joint pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Moderator of the Free Churches, David Coffey, and the Armenian Patriarch of Great Britain, Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian.

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, meanwhile, told the BBC that the pilgrimage was an 'act of solidarity'.

"We are here to express our desire for peace in this land of conflict," he said.

"Our presence here is not just symbolic."

The Archbishop of Canterbury has returned from the Holy Land with a call to British churches to take more action raise the profile of Christians in the Middle East.