The war in Iraq has cost the US over $1 trillion as well as the lives of more than 4,000 servicemen and women. The total number of Iraqi casualties will never be known. Associated Press estimates 110,000 violent deaths; the Lancet 601,000; ORB, 1,033,000 killed.
Irrespective of the humanitarian or military justification for the invasion, what is not widely acknowledged is the possibility that apocalyptic religious convictions may have influenced George W. Bush to go to war.
James Haught is the editor of the Charleston Gazette. In July he wrote an article entitled Agog over Bush's comments on Gog and Magog. Here's a flavour:
You can read the rest hereIncredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him:
"Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. ... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."
This bizarre -- seemingly deranged -- episode happened while the White House was assembling its "coalition of the willing" to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush's call, and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."
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.
See also an earlier article George W. Bush and the Road to Armageddon
