Mary Grierson said she had emailed the challenge to the White House and as an open letter to leading U.S. newspapers.

“Send your troops home and take me instead, on behalf of everyone in the world who does not want war and oppression,” she wrote.

But the deal has a catch — Bush would have to personally hammer in the nails.

“I don’t think he would have the courage to do it quite frankly, but that is the measure of a man,” she told Radio New Zealand.

“Can he follow through with this aim of creating more chaos in the world if he had to do it just to one person himself?”

It is not the first novel expression of protest in New Zealand against a looming U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Another woman spent 1,000 pounds last month on an anti-war newspaper advertisement directed at Bush in the hope it would be seen by the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and passed on to Washington.