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A cautionary tale…
Why Bush invaded Iraq: the war on Gog and Magog
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On Sunday GQ magazine published an amazing scoop revealing that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embellished top-secret wartime memos with covers featuring quotations from the Bible. Leaked by an unknown official who was disturbed enough to keep copies but reluctant to fan Islamic fears that the United States was on a crusade, the memos are being seen as Rumsfeld’s means of manipulating or ingratiating himself with the born-again President. From Ephesians he chose:
But there is another, perhaps more alarming, story about Bush’s Christian fundamentalism and the Iraq War that has yet to come to light. In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacque Chirac. Bush told Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and they had to be defeated. Gog and Magog are Biblical creatures, forces of the Apocalypse, who appear in Genesis and Ezekiel. At the end of the millennium they would come out of the north and, unless stopped, destroy Israel in a final battle. Bush believed the time had now come for that battle. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:
Bush is believed to have told 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 emerged only because the Elysee Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Roemer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Roemer subsequently gave an account in the September 2003 issue of University’s review, Allez savoir. The small piece apparently went unnoticed, although it was repeated in a French newspaper in 2007. The story has been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book yet to be published in English by French 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 fundamentally religious. He was driven by his understanding of the realisation of Biblical revelation in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse raises serious questions about Australia’s participation in the war. In his intimate moments with Bush, did John Howard hear about Gog and Magog and the holy mission to fight the forces of Satan? More than three thousand US troops have died in the campaign to defeat the evil forces from the north. Were Australian troops sent to risk their lives because of George Bush’s Biblical delusions? In a coda to this story I stumbled across a curious fact. It’s common knowledge that while a senior at Yale George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society, a fact that has given rise to lurid stories about an old boys’ network at the pinnacle of corporate, government and CIA power. George’s father, George H.W. Bush had also been a “Bonesman”, as indeed had his father. Members of Skull & Bones are assigned or take on nicknames when they join. And what was George Bush Senior’s nickname? “Magog”. |
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43 Comments
Is this one of the known unknowns that Rumsfeld famously pontificated about? Or is it a known unknown known?
Maybe we shall never know. Or unknow.
Compared to this, the ‘blood for oil’ policy sounds reasonable.
Magog, what a bunch. Thank Gog they have finally left the building.
Think about this from Dubya’s point of view. The Lord had saved him from alcoholism and general wastage so the least Dubya could do was to return the favour and help the Lord out with all that Armageddon business. It is not easy to pull off an Armageddon even if you are a Number One God and I’m sure He appreciated George’s helping hand. I haven’t heard Him complain and, knowing God as well as I do, I’m sure He was very appreciative. He would be, He’s a real gentleman and you’d never find a better bloke than Him.
so it’s started by a religous nut with daddy issues? no wonder it was so stuffed.
Cripes and crikey, now that is frightening. All these right wing Chrisitian loonies are mad enough to blow up the world on the say so of a wacko President. No one should have that much power, I give no one permission to blow up my world so back off Bush. OH!! Don’t forget that little Johny was as fundamental as “W” and probably would have helped George press the button (didn’t Johny get a medal for being a bbbbuddy of George?).
Richard Dawkins is right. Religion is the source of all wars and evil.
Jesus!
Rumsfeld’s speech on unknown unknowns wasn’t original (did you expect it to be?) but a quote from Clausewitz and even Thoreau.
“To those things Clausewitz wrote about uncertainty and chance, I would add a few comments on unknown unknowns — those things that a commander doesn’t even know he doesn’t know. Participants in a war game would describe an unknown unknown as unfair, beyond the ground rules of the game. But real war does not follow ground rules, and I would urge that games be “unfair” by introducing unknown unknowns”
“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge” - Thoreau
George Bush you bloody idiot, to think this fool had the final say to nuke anyone. What does it say about the rodent Howard, who has recently emerged from his lair to pontificate on how fortunate we are to have had him steering the ship for 12 years. What biblical messages was he getting from dubya? We can be certain pious Pete was told, “go forth and multiply” at least that was the message he passed on, one for each hand and one for the president, or something like that.
I’m sure there will be some educated guesses as to what gems from the good book were passed on to the rodent, mine are all nasty and I would not wish to be unpleasant to the horrible little man
How interesting.
Not a single mention of Saddam or the devastating result of his 30 year tyranny: the gassing of the Kurds; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the 14 ‘binding’ UN reolutions that he ignored; his corruption of the UN via food-for-oil; his attacks on Iran, Kuwait, Saudi, Israel.
No no - it was all because George Bush was a religious nut. If only the great Chirac had saved us!
By the way - is Iraq better off today than if Saddam was still in power? Hmm?
And this man has his finger on the nukular button. We are all still alive, thanks be to Gog.
This is madness. The Bush’s are serious Bonesmen. Skull and Bones is a secretive satannic cult started at Yale in 1848 from memory, and presided over for many years by the Harrimans and Browns for whom GHW’s father Prescott Bush worked in the early part of the 20th century. Do you honestly believe someone who is sworn to secrecy and loyalty to this cult his whole life on pain of death is likely to be working for the armies of the lord? Someone’s lord maybe but not necessarily the one the writer is talking of. Anyway, why not ask Magog or, if he’s unavailable, former rival for president John Kerry - another Bonesman?
I dont know if anybody else read Matt Taibi’s left behind article http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/5939999/reverend_doomsday/
These articles cover bush’s left behind armagedeonism(is that a word).?
Oh, so now that the price has fallen somewhat it wasnt oil? It was the Bible.
@ Leslie, clearly it’s not religion thats teh cause of all wars and evil - its the misuse of religion by self-interested people, aided and abetted by a fuzzy-headed lack of clear thinking on the part of those who should know better.
Ah, the bete noir of the Left, God! Saddam’s invasion of a sovereign state, his attempt to turn the Middle East into a cauldron by raining Scuds on a non combatant nation, his use of chemical weapons on unarmed civilians, his relentless persecution of minorities, his refusal to co-operate with the UN inspection teams, his sons ‘habit’ of taking any woman they fancied and killing their husband if they defended their wife, man, to the Left that’s water of a duck’s back!
What was that biblical injunction about straining out gnats while you swallow camels?
How many Christian Talibans are still there (Congress)?
According to Thomas Szasz:
‘If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you - you have schizophrenia’.
Please Clive, I will be the first to say that Bush’s policies left a lot to be desired, but a conspiracy theory that George W is a religious nut? Okay… well it’s probably the truth, but haven’t we got better things to read about how the now ex-president may or may not have been on a crusade, based on here say and a couple of quotes from the bible.
This article is just a page filler
“By the way - is Iraq better off today than if Saddam was still in power? Hmm?
Good question. There are some people who were involved in the invasion of Iraq who are certainly better off, I don’t think they are Iraqi though.
“Not a single mention of Saddam or the devastating result of his 30 year tyranny: the gassing of the Kurds; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the 14 ‘binding’ UN reolutions that he ignored; his corruption of the UN via food-for-oil; his attacks on Iran, Kuwait, Saudi, Israel.”
That Saddam was a bad man is known by all and disputed by nobody. Stop it.
Reading this article I thought:
Nostradamus (the predictions)
Blues Brothers (“mission from god”)
Dubya’s beliefs (“taken with a grain of salt” - read the entrails)
I just know that one day in the future, my family and children will concur with me with the belief that GW2 was WRONG.
Not much comfort for the citizens of Iraq. I am pretty sure the country has been bombed back to the stone age in the past 20 years.
Imagine if the world objected to Kevin Rudd so much they threw missiles and bombs at us - um change that to John Howard
Religion has a lot to answer for.
Yes, on the one hand this leak confirms what was already quite obvious; Bush’s primary motivations as president were religious. What it also confirms, more importantly, are the degrees to which the people around Bush manipulated him.
Bush was a simple man, feeling he had been ordained into the Presidency by his god. In reality, that ascendency was carefully orchestrated by cold war republicans, who then proceeded to install themselves in positions of power so as to puppeteer him for their own ends. And what ends were those?
Well, you can read about it all on their website -
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, all architects of the Iraq war, and all members of the Project for a New American Century. An organisation dedicated to entrenching America’s global hegemony into the 21st century by launching trillion dollar wars. Can it be called a conspiracy when their intentions and plans are sitting out there for all to see in black and white?
So brother Usama was and is right!!!
No Khaled, “brother Usama” is a warped fanatic and a callous mass murderer.
Tamas Calderwood ignores some basic history and facts about the nature of political power. Saddam was an evil bastard. Did some evil stuff. No dispute. That an Iraqi leader would behave this way was inevitable, not that Tamas can admit this because it hurts her arguement. Iraq never existed before WW1, it was drawn up in the British Foreign Office in the early 20’s and brought together people who had never regarded themselves as belonging to the same nation. The Kurds regarded themselves as the same nation as the Turkish Kurds, other groups regarded themselves as Persian and so on. As with other ‘nations’ made up of groups who regard each other with suspicion at best (Yugoslavia being the best example, pre civil war US being another), in the long term, rulers are either very tough on at least some of the population or they lose control and the country breaks up. Iraq does not and never will have the sort of free society we enjoy in Australia. That it has, for the time being, a democratically elected government has not brought freedom. Many lives were lost under Saddam, many lives were lost after Saddam. Where is the improvement?
And John James, while your history is true, you’ve missed some key points. Saddam did all the things you accuse him of - while he was the Reagan administration’s best mate and the recipient of massive US military support. Hmm. Forget that little detail, did we?
“There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was fundamentally religious.”
What a load of crap. Clive Hamilton presumably uses a weird throwaway accusation in a French President’s autobiography to substantiate this or he has been watching too much Angels & Demons. The Skull and Bones reference suggests perhaps the later.
Crikey, this type of stuff should be left to the Grassy Knoll column, not the main page.
daveliberts - My point was that Saddam’s actions over 30 years of brutal rule surely had something to do with the invasion. To say it was all because George Bush is a religious nut ignores the fact that Saddam was a danger to the world.
And I don’t accept that the Iraqis can’t build a democracy. At least they have a chance to do so now instead of being murdered in Saddam’s torture chambers and killing fields.
And if you don’t think there has been an improvement in Iraq since Saddam was removed from power then you’re not looking very hard. Radical Islamists have killed many people but the ‘surge’ worked and Iraq has a chance to be normal. Good luck to them and good riddance to Saddam.
Finally, you say during the 80’s that Saddam received “massive US military support”. False. The UK and US supplied less than 2% of Saddam’s weapons. All his tanks were Soviet made and the French sold him lots of weapons (and a nuclear reactor) too.
Mmm. Resource crusade. Who would have ever guessed?
i’d like to know where michael feller works, hangs out, etc.. he’s obviously paid handsomely to not listen and not see and not feel and not smell and not sense and not read and not empathise with those who have truly suffered as a result of this phoney christian-capitalist war. ‘fess up fella!
“Not a single mention of Saddam or the devastating result of his 30 year tyranny: the gassing of the Kurds; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the 14 ‘binding’ UN reolutions that he ignored; his corruption of the UN via food-for-oil; [or] his attacks on Iran, Kuwait, Saudi, Israel”
….. in Bush’s modus operandi?
30 years? chutzpah! a 200 year tyranny is the real deal?
why do people always think that their own country’s actions are more virtuous than others?
let me find that orwell quote…
ah, here it is:
“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change it’s moral colour when it is committed by ‘our side’”. George Orwell, 1945.
there’s nothing virtuous about industrialised civilisation. most modern australians don’t even know the name of the tribal land their slice of heaven is occupying. it’s easy to make a monster out of someone like Hussein, in fact it’s regularly necessary in order to divert the attention away from our own deeds and actions.
carn, ‘fess up too boyfriend.
“There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was fundamentally religious.”
Come on. This is lazy writing. Bush might be a fundamentalist nut, and Rumsfeld might have used religion to push him over the line, but the evidence for your statement is far from complete.
It doesn’t raise any questions about Australia’s participation in the war than have already been asked. John Howard wasn’t a religious nut. He was also a ‘good’ politician. His reasons for throwing Australia into the war would have been more in line with Rumsfeld i.e. profit.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
This is more about anal retentiveness than Gods power and wishes for Humankind.
In the Bush family (home) ‘lord’ not Lord is a code word for a painful haemorrhoid.
Sex is more powerful than reason especially with those in ‘self love’
I have often described our famous Johnny before here as ‘getting his jollies behind a bush’ so that seriously profound look from Bush would always set Johnny’s head a’nodding.
This article does bring into to focus those of us who know things that others don’t and just how much the media and prof’s missed in the last 10 years because of psychologically induced visual deficits.
Who or what is lord John.
ANSWER:
A pain in a-s (Bush’s) that demanded aknowledgement.
Lies, damned lies and statistics, Tamas.
Here’s a well-referenced article about US support to Iraq in Saddam’s heyday:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqgate
Civilian deaths have dropped since the surge. Deaths under Saddam also dropped very significantly after Gulf War 1 (not that you’d know that from John James post). I remain far from convinced that Iraq is better off for having suffered Gulf War 2. If it’s a stable democracy in 10 years, I may well change my assessment but I’m not holding my breath.
daveliberts
I didn’t say the US gave Saddam no support in the 1980’s. I said it wasn’t Saddam’s major sponsor - the Soviets and French were.
I agree it was a mistake to support Saddam against Iran in the 1980’s. So what? The situation by 2003 was radically different.
And it’s pretty cheap for you to say that Iraqis are no better off and they may as well have kept Saddam. To dismiss 25+ million people to that kind of endless brutality is rather easy to do from the comforts of modern Australia. Of course, if we were threatened with that kind of tyranny which is the first country you would expect to help us? I’m guessing it starts with a US and ends in A.
The Garden of Self Defense: You say that “there’s nothing virtuous about industrialised civilisation”
Really? so western civilization outlawed slavery (an ancient, all-cultural practise), elevated women to equal status, invented modern science and technology and provides healthier lives to its people than any civilization in history, but there’s nothing virtuous about it? Gosh.
You also say “it’s easy to make a monster out of someone like Hussein, in fact it’s regularly necessary in order to divert the attention away from our own deeds and actions”.
Right. So we only condemned Saddam’s killing fields and torture chambers to divert attention from our own, um, what? Which of our deeds and actions rival Saddams?
Your argument is moral-relevance at its worst. And pretty ahistorical too.
Tamas, the situation by 2003 certainly was different compared with the 80’s. The Saddam-initiated death toll among minority groups was much, much lower after Gulf War 1 than before it. Since Gulf War 2, thousands have died who otherwise would not have. And democracy has recently brought state-sanctioned legislated rape to the female Shiite population. Yay for that! You have a funny definition of success.
Also, you seem to keep mistaking the nation which manufactured the weapons Iraq used with the nation that funded them. The US paid for the French weapons used. I suspect they didn’t pay for the Soviet weaponry. The article I referenced makes many many references to the US funding the purchase of non-US weapons. The only reason you keep banging on about the French is to smudge the argument and I’m not falling for it.
The fact remains that countries like Iraq (see my first post on this page) face struggles of the type we’ve never seen in Australia. When groups of people who have nothing in common culturally or historically are swept up in a single country, that creates a big challenge for any government to hold the situation together. Saddam held it together with brute force. If he hadn’t, someone else would have. Democracy is made all the more difficult when certain groups feel they’re on the receiving end of a worse deal than other groups, and in Iraq this has already led to much bloodshed. I genuinely hope Iraqi democracy succeeds and the suffering ends. I am pessimistic about this actually occurring because it fails most of the time - Yugoslavia collapsed when dictatorship ended, too many African nations have done the same, India split at independence in 1947, the list is very long. Dictatorships which have successfully transitioned to democracy are generally much more homogenous than Iraq.
Finally, if Saddam was ever ‘a danger to the world’, he certainly wasn’t after Gulf War 1. The suggestion that he had any power beyond Iraq’s borders in 2003 has not been borne out by anything discovered since the US took control of the country. You must have missed that press release - the WMD never existed. Unlike many on the left, though, I am happy to agree that the US probably genuinely believed they did at the time of invasion. They still had the receipts, after all.
Tamas, what part of the comparison between 30 years and 200 years did you not understand? What part of Aboriginal history post occupation have you not studied and not understood viscerally? Do you feel something when someone punches you? Has René Descartes transformed you into a just another head on legs?
If I undressed you from your wage-slave clothes, as I’m about to do, you would find a slave-child stuck to every thread and button of your lovely fine garb. There are more slaves in the world now than at any other time, it’s just they are largely invisible to the civilised, and we call them other things like child workers. But they’re there, they all exist, 150,000,000 of them, it’s just you have to feel that punch land right in your guts to feel them.
I have to say, you are not very good at joining the dots. Women, equal status? What a lovely utopia your head on legs inhabits.
Healthier lives? We are a culture of diabetics, chronic illness, cancer sufferers and depressives. These are all pathologies of civilisation. Modern science and technology is the very reason why Indian farmers have been suiciding en masse (yippee! Monsanto - go team Tamas go!), why Australian top-soils have been reduced to a mere 1% humus in just 200 years (dust bowl agriculture - Green revolution - go team Tamas go!), why most of the world’s genetically modified crops are failing, why we have a massive carbon and methane pollution problem, why synthetic contaminants in factory farms are producing things like swine flu, why dioxins pollute every river in the world, why 90% of the world’s large fish have been systematically vacuumed and will never recover, why giant islands of plastic waste inhabit the seas. I could make this list as long as you needed, but Tamas, you really need to open your eyes a bit more before you accuse people of holding a flawed argument.
Modern science and technology aid aggregate-growth economics (which as ecological-economists know is uneconomic and unsustainable). Aggregate-growth economics have destroyed over 90% of wild ecologies, systemically it aids population. Intelligent humans and non-humans do not bred past the capacity of the landbase. That is almost everyone except for us.
We’re all very unwell Tamas and self-enslaved, just some haven’t sensed it yet; we’re still getting high on an era of pop-fascism.
@Gardens, most of what you are presenting is irrelevant conclusions, or red herrings, if you prefer. Want to bring the argument back to the topic, instead of yammering on about ecological/biological issues that afflict today’s world?
daveliberts -
A couple of points.
You say that Saddam’s murder rate went down after Gulf War 1. I don’t accept that. he killed between 150,000-300,000 people in the Shia south of the country after they rose up against him. Ok, ok, he stopped gassing the Kurds and invading countries, but are you really saying that a little bit less genocide is ok?
You also say “When groups of people who have nothing in common culturally or historically are swept up in a single country that creates a big challenge for any government to hold the situation together. Saddam held it together with brute force. If he hadn’t, someone else would have.”
But Iraq is mostly Arab, so they have that in common. They are also Muslim (albeit split between Sunni and Shia) and it was all part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century. So I just don’t accept that they needed a dictator to hold the place together.
Finally, how can you say Iraq didn’t threaten anyone after Gulf War 1? Saddam ignored 14 UN binding resolutions and broke all the conditions of the 1991 armistice, he gave $25,000 to the families of Paletinian suicide bombers, he fired on US and UK aircraft in the no-fly zones, he had a huge WMD program uncovered in 1995 when his son-in-law defected, he tried to assasinate Bush Snr in 1993, he massed his forces on the Kuwaiti border in 1994 and only backed down when the US mobilized forces more quickly, he kicked out UN inspectors in 1998, he corrupted the UN oil-for-food program. Want me to go on? Surely all that stuff mattered.
the garden of self defence -
You sound really depressed dude. You need to look on the bright side every now and then.
And by the way, the climate apocalypse is not coming - so relax.