By Susan Cornwell and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination next year will have to call for a change in President George W. Bush's Iraq war strategy, the Senate's most outspoken Republican war critic said on Tuesday.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who last month decided not to run for president, believes a Republican can still win in 2008 despite Bush's overwhelming unpopularity. The president is a Republican.

But with some 65 percent of Americans telling pollsters they want the Iraq war that Bush started to end, the Republican nominee -- who could emerge early next year -- will not be able to campaign on staying the course, Hagel said.

"I don't know how a presidential candidate goes to the American people next year and says, 'I am in favor of continuing the policies that are now in place in Iraq,' and think that they're going to win," Hagel, of Nebraska, told Reuters in an interview in his office.

The Republican nominee will have to come up with something better than Bush's open-ended war, Hagel said, adding: "This country is not going to elect George Bush Three as president next year."

Hagel said next year's campaigns will further intensify the focus on the war. That, coupled with growing discontent with the huge financial and human cost of the war and a need to bring exhausted troops home will "propel a renewed review and debate" in Congress about the direction of the war, he said.

All of the leading Republican candidates have so far stood behind Bush on the war, with Arizona Sen. John McCain perhaps the most outspoken.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, who leads the 2008 Republican field in national polls, backed Bush's decision to add troops this year, while Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has echoed Bush's hopes that the troop surge will pave the way for some troop withdrawals.

EARLY CRITIC OF WAR

A decorated Vietnam combat veteran, Hagel, 61, voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq but became an early and vociferous Republican critic of the war. He has decided not to seek a third six-year Senate term next year.

Hagel rejects that things in Iraq are changing, despite statistics showing recent improvement on some security fronts.

"We sink deeper and deeper into an abyss of disaster," Hagel said. "We are bogged down in a very dangerous way. I personally do not see anything that's going to change or make that situation get better."

He ticked off a list of worsening problems, from U.S. tensions with Iran over Tehran's role in Iraq, to increased insurgent attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone where U.S. diplomats live, and the allegations of misconduct against private security contractors like Blackwater.

Senate Democrats have struggled all year to wind down the Iraq war but the chamber remains gridlocked. Hagel is one of a few Republicans who have voted with Democrats to withdraw troops, all the time urging fellow Republicans to dare to join him.

"If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes," he told senators last January.

But even though his pleas had little apparent effect, Hagel says he has no regrets about his maverick role.

"I don't want to live with the regret that members of the Congress, certainly many of them, in their later lives had (about) Vietnam," said Hagel, who was awarded two Purple Hearts while serving in Vietnam, where he saved his brother Tom by pulling him out of a burning vehicle.

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