{"id":357,"date":"2009-05-26T12:04:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T12:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/2009\/05\/bush-on-iraq-war-this-confront.html"},"modified":"2009-05-26T12:04:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T12:04:00","slug":"bush-on-iraq-war-this-confront","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2009\/05\/bush-on-iraq-war-this-confront.html","title":{"rendered":"Bush on Iraq War: “This confrontation is willed by God.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am speechless<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

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.
\n
\nIn 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:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:<\/p>\n

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I look like a fool now to all those people I argued with who thought (wrongly, as I believed) that Bush was engaging in a Christian crusade war and that the whole thing was really for Israel’s benefit. I still believe Bush never equated Islam or muslims with the evil he refers to, however. In Bush’s mind the evil was Al Qaeda, not Islam.<\/p>\n

There’s also not-inconsiderable irony in the thought that if Bush really was motivated by such biblical apocalyptic prophecy in deciding to go to war in Iraq, then he may well have been the instrument of that confrontation himself. Prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling. In a bizarre twist, Magog was also Bush Sr.’s nickname at the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale (to which GWB also belonged).<\/p>\n

I suppose we have to wait for his memoirs. Let’s see if Bush disavows this statement above; it should be the number-one priority for any journalist interviewing the former president on any topic or for any other reason.<\/p>\n

(via Crunchy Con<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am speechless. 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. 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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}