Bush displayed his religious convictions in a way none of his predecessors had ever done in modern times and Bin Laden was conducting a holy war against the United States, said the winner of the 1999 Nobel prize for literature and author of the novel "The Tin Drum".

"The United States is behaving more and more like a war criminal," the veteran author told a German television talk show, in a bitter attack on the US use of cluster bombs in Iraq.

Cluster bombs split up into smaller "bomblets" which spread out over a wide area and are devastatingly effective against tanks, artillery, troops and civilians.

The bomblets often fail to explode on impact and the half-buried explosives remain a serious danger to local people long after the conflict is over.

Iraqi children are at grave risk from cluster bombs partly because they are coloured yellow like the food packages dropped from US and British planes, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF warned on Friday.

"The United States should be in the dock," Grass said.

"The Americans will win the war but the true losers will be in the United States because that country has lost a considerable part of its reputation," Grass said.

He pointed out that Washington had backed a long string of dictators and brutal regimes for as long as they served the interests of US foreign policy.

WAR.WIRE