Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War : Information Clearing House - ICH
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.
The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.
The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.
In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.
There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.
3 comments:
Let me tell you one factor that turned me off to organised religion, for which I used to have some respect. (I thought it might lead people to act more morally than they would otherwise.)
In the mid-1990s, I worked a lot at some psychiatric facilities in Florida. For a hoot, sometimes I'd work as a "psych tech" at the local Crisis Stabilization Unit. This was like being an orderly, a step down from being a nurse, which I was, but I got paid my normal nurse's salary. It wasn't hard yards, and it was fun observing the nutballs who had been dragged in by the police when they freaked out in the community.
I noticed that a lot of the paranoid schizophrenics used to rave with religious delusions of a violent nature. It was all about who God wanted them to kill, and what the Devil was doing. Their hate-filled lunacy was not that far removed from the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons. I could hear traces of that in the ideology of fundie preachers, and the hard-core religios I talked to in everyday life.
Religion is fairy tales. When I hear someone talk about "God" I mentally substitute the name "Santa Claus" in what they're saying. They're loony.
And now further evidence that a guy with the authority to launch nuclear missiles was as loopy as the smelly bloke who's talking to himself on the tram...
You have to wonder what George's bedtime conversations with God are like these days.
"So Lord, I'm trying to understand why the apocalypse you promised didn't happen, why all those dominoes in the Middle East didn't fall, and why you made me the laughing stock of the entire planet. God?... God....????"
I've always wondered if his religiosity was just a put-on, like his Texas accent shit. But it seems he was a weak 40-yo man who found something to cling to.
All these religions promise CERTAINTY when in fact the whole point of life and God and the meaning of things is the great mystery behind it. Deal with it, you dicks.
I've always wondered if his religiosity was just a put-on, like his Texas accent shit. But it seems he was a weak 40-yo man who found something to cling to.
A lot of the time, we become the person we choose to pretend to be. Bushwit chose to be the swaggering cowboy (despite being from New England), then the morally certain religious warrior (despite being a brain-damaged drunk.) It's not what he actually WAS in real life; it's the role he played until it became his reality. Or at least the personal reality he got other people to buy.
I do the same thing -- play the hard-bitten, know-it-all, smart-talking Yank. And when I still lived back there, same role-play, just minus the Yank part. I don't think that's who I was in my soul, but I've been acting like that for so long now it's the truth. It's a decent act...
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