Did Gog and Magog “tell” President Bush to go to war in Iraq?

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On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, I blogged with the following:

Vanity Fair contributing editor and former NYTimes reporter Kurt Eichenwald is out promoting a new Bush-Derangement Syndrome book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

You can read an excerpt at Vanity Fair.

To be clear, this is an anti-Bush book, putting the worst possible spin upon events described in the book. I loathe spending any money on this; but even partisan books can provide nuggets of useful information when you can cross-reference and wade through the bias filter that any actual facts had been transmuted and distorted through.

Last Friday, Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble ( books highly critical of the Bush decision to invade Iraq), wrote a NYTimes review of Eichenwald’s new book:

A more deadly consequence of this heedlessness was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false belief that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. An exchange from that time conveys the mind-set of the Bush administration. When Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, told Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary, that there was no intelligence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, “Wolfowitz tightened his lips,” Eichenwald writes. “ ‘We’ll find it,’ he said with certainty in his voice. ‘It’s got to be there.’ ” The run-up to the Iraq war also elicits one of the most pungent lines in the book. After Bush told Jacques Chirac that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and specifically that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” the French president decided, in Eichenwald’s words, that “France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.”

BDSers- especially the secular militant atheistic extremist types- went stir-crazy during the Bush years over Dubbya’s apparent wearing of his religion on his sleeve.

Although the former president 43 is indeed a man of faith, he was hardly a Crusadist, theocratic leader who decided to invade Iraq because God Bible-thumpingly told him to (As far as I know, the claim is unverified heresay).

Tom Ricks liked the “Gog and Magog” reference so much, he found it noteworthy enough for a blogpost.

One of Ricks’ commenters, Xenophon, mentions:

Here is a passage from the “Secular Humanism” website that attributes the information on Bush’s Biblical prophecy to a Dr. Thomas Romer, a French theologian at the University of Lausanne who was asked by Chirac’s advisors to interpret Bush’s telephone message:

“After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to ‘turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.’

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.”

CounterPunch‘s Clive Hamilton writes:

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.

Read the rest of Hamilton’s piece, and you get the sense that he might be writing his piece while wearing his tin-foil hat.

As in the Mahmoud Abbas claim regarding “God told me to invade Iraq”, I am willing to believe that President Bush might have mentioned God or even made reference to Gog and Magog, but that whatever he said has been conflated or distorted, giving more meaning and significance than is warranted.

It’s like George W. Bush making a case that freedom is a God-given right and “every human being bears the image of our maker.”

How many people find the following characterization alarmist:

he told a group of Christian broadcasters that his policies in the region were predicated on the beliefs that freedom was a God-given right and ‘every human being bears the image of our maker.'”

I’m also reminded of the following from 2007 as it relates to Bob Woodward’s promotion of his book, Plan of Attack:

Having given the order, the president walked alone around the circle behind the White House. Months later, he told Woodward: “As I walked around the circle, I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness.”

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.’”

(Pg 379 in Woodward’s book)

Obviously President Bush is devoted to his faith. But he never “Pushed his religion” on the nation. He just wasn’t afraid to express himself when most secularists want (and the ACLU demands) those who believe in a higher power to remain in the closet; to keep their faith tucked away out of public sight, murmured only in privacy and never on open display in public.

Remember how cringe-induced people were to President Bush mentioning of the word “crusade”? Think that was blown a bit out of context by those of eggshell sensitivities? Actually, it was a poor slip. But anyone who objectively looked at how President Bush prosecuted the GWoT could see that he was anything but anti-Islam and anti-Muslim.

Ricks does note in his NYTimes review that:

Eichenwald’s prose occasionally lapses into the style of Tom Clancy’s novels, complete with the bureaucrat-as-hero theme and overwrought prose: “The electronic timer on a concealed briefcase bomb flashed red, its digits counting down from five minutes. A small fan quietly whirred, generating a breath of air that could disperse enough sarin gas to kill everyone within several yards.” The histrionic tone seems unnecessary when writing about some of the most dramatic events of our time. And it is especially grating when the Clancyesque details are wrong, as when he portrays Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, as sharply decisive when he was notorious inside the Pentagon for being imperious but vacillating. There are also some odd errors. The people of Afghanistan are “Afghans,” not “Afghanis,” which is the currency. Yet Eichenwald refers to them this way more than 20 times. Likewise, Aq Kupruk is near the Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif, but is a village, not a city, as Eichenwald writes. And Gen. Wesley Clark was retired from military service when he is shown on a visit to the Pentagon, so why is he depicted as having “dozens of medals and service ribbons gleaming on his chest”?

Sounds like a lot of fiction-writing and slip-shod sloppy research journalism to me…even the parts (or perhaps especially the parts) that anti-Bush author Thomas Ricks relished.

Not sure I will purchase Eichenwald’s book; but I’m curious enough to go down to the local Barnes & Noble and peruse the contents.

I love anti-Bush and anti-Iraq war books! Especially those of BDS-induced fevered imaginings.

*UPDATE*:

Interesting passage from Robert Draper’s book, Dead Certain, pg 189-190:

Bush knew where he had to turn.

It didn’t come naturally, talking about his faith. Bushes tended not to boast of their devoutness. As a gubernatorial candidate, and later as governor, he never spoke publicly of his days teaching Sunday school in Dallas. He and Laura read the Bible daily, and they spoke to the girls about their Christian faith. And even though by 1996 Bush was a vocal proponent of government support for faith-based initiatives, he largely restricted his own articulation of faith to praying before his meals.

On November 3, 1996, Bush spoke to an Austin Presbyterian congregation at the behest of one of its elders, Karen Hughes. “I usually don’t address churches or religious organizations,” he acknowledged in his speech that Sunday. “I worry about the political world adopting the religious world. I think of the candidates who say, ‘Vote for me, I am the most religious.’ Or, ‘I walk closer to God than old so-and-so.’ How contradictory to the teachings of the Lord.”

Said Bush that day, “I have worries. Worries about dragging my wife into a fishbowl and worries about the happiness of our twin teenagers. I have moments of doubt, moments of pride, and moments of hope. Yet my faith helps me a lot. I have a sense of calm because I do believe in the Bible when it implores: ‘Thy will be done.’ I guess it is the Presbyterian in me that says if it is meant to be, it is meant to be. There is something very assuring in the belief that there is a higher being and a divine plan.”

Seven years later, on the eve of sending his fellow countrymen off to kill and possibly be killed, George W. Bush tried to explain to a group that belief was his beacon, not his almighty spear. “I would never justify my faith to make a difficult decision on war and peace,” he told them. “I would use my faith to help guide me personally and provide the strength I need as an individual.”

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The writer may have taken the word of a writer who has since been outed as having created a ”sock puppet,” in the form of a retired history professor who was (supposedly) in the Oval Office when Bush said such things.
This writer has not only been debunked by the facts that no history professor ever taught at the university he claimed the guy was from, but no person of that name was ever a history professor in the entire USA.
Later, after even more debunking of his ”story,” the writer admitted he had made up the whole thing.
Still he writes sometimes.
And people who don’t know the way he might twist things still believe him.

I wrote about that here before:

[T]here was sock puppet (Terry Wilkinson) who was used as a literary device by Doug T. to tell Leftist America what they KNEW must be true about Bush.

It didn’t take the blogosphere long to debunk that myth.
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2006/07/wheres_george_1.html

Jacques Chirac, President of France from May 1995 to May 2007

At the invitation of Saddam Hussein , Jacques Chirac made an official visit to Baghdad in 1975 and sold Saddam two nuclear reactors that started Baghdad on the path to nuclear weapons capability. In return Saddam approved a deal granting French oil companies a number of privileges plus a 23 per cent share of Iraqi oil. This is the deal in which France sold Iraq the Osirak MTR nuclear reactor, a type designed to test nuclear materials,. The Osirak reactor was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981provoking considerable anger from French officials and the United Nations Security Council. By 2000, France had become Iraq’s largest supplier of military and dual-use equipment.

In 2002–2003, France led several other European countries in an effort to prevent the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent over throw of Saddam.

Jacques Chirac is to be believed?

per Wikipedia:

Accused of corruption, convicted

Chirac has been named in several cases of alleged corruption that occurred during his term as mayor, some of which have led to felony convictions of some politicians and aides. However, a controversial judicial decision in 1999 granted Chirac immunity while he was president of France. He refused to testify on these matters, arguing that it would be incompatible with his presidential functions. Investigations concerning the running of Paris’s city hall, the number of whose municipal employees jumped by 25% from 1977 to 1995 (with 2,000 out of approximately 35,000 coming from the Corrèze region where Chirac had held his seat as deputy), as well as a lack of financial transparency (marchés publics) and the communal debt, were thwarted by the legal impossibility of questioning him as president. The conditions of the privatisation of the Parisian water network, acquired very cheaply by the Générale and the Lyonnaise des Eaux, then directed by Jérôme Monod, a close friend of Chirac, were also criticised. Furthermore, the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné revealed the astronomical “food expenses” paid by the Parisian municipality (€15 million a year according to the Canard), expenses managed by Roger Romani (who allegedly destroyed all archives of the period 1978–1993 during night raids in 1999–2000). Thousands of people were invited each year to receptions in the Paris city hall, while many political, media and artistic personalities were hosted in private flats owned by the city.

Chirac’s immunity from prosecution ended in May 2007, when he left office as president. In November 2007 a preliminary charge of misuse of public funds was filed against him. Chirac is said to be the first former French head of state to be formally placed under investigation for a crime. On 30 October 2009, a judge ordered Chirac to stand trial on embezzlement charges, dating back to his time as mayor of Paris.

On 15 December 2011, Chirac was found guilty in two related cases, involving 19 totally or partially fake jobs created for his benefit by the RPR Party, which he led as Paris mayor from 1977 to 1995. He was convicted of embezzling public funds, abuse of trust, and illegal conflict of interest

“France has usually been governed by prostitutes.”
Mark Twain 1879

Since this country is governed by a Christian faith—especially when Republicans are involved (you’ll find more statements extolling radical Christian tenets from Republicans than Democrats)—it’s hard to believe that these beliefs don’t find their way into issues of government. But members of the Christian Right are still debating whether Bush was told by God that going to war would be doing God’s work. If God talks to people and guides them all the time, why is it so hard to believe that Bush said he was receiving messages and guidance in this matter also? Perhaps it’s because such illusions make him sound like a crazy person. I would agree.

@Liberal1 (Objectivity):

it’s hard to believe that these beliefs don’t find their way into issues of government.

Indeed, it amazes me how NEA dominated American public schools fail to teach this. For example a Republican Rev. Martin Luther King’s religious beliefs inform much of post WWII American civil rights legislation. Christian abolitionist religious beliefs informed America’s efforts to free America’s Black slaves. The Republic Party was founded under the substantial influence of Christian abolitionist religious beliefs.

Similarly, Christian religious beliefs underwrite the American founding and founding documents:

Religion in the Founding of the American Republic

I like how you go so far to defend Bush’s reasoning for war when we learned many years ago the case was bunk. If George Bush had a legitimate reason for war, he should have presented that case, instead he lied. Why lie unless you have no compelling argument? You are severely brainwashed by Zionist propaganda. I was in Iraq, twice. The whole thing was bullshit. We just drove people and supplies around, wait to get hit, then conduct “investigstions” to detain people. It was a scam. You nutjob evangelicals have bought into zionist propaganda so you give them your votes and money and if you’re not an evangelical, then you dont understand this world at all. I was raised one.