[This article was obtained from the following URL, 
but has since been removed.]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-509925.html

October 7, 2005

Bush: God told me to invade Iraq
President 'revealed reasons for war in private meeting'

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to
invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden's stronghold of
Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace
to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a state
for the Palestinians.

The President made the assertion during his first
meeting with Palestinian leaders in June 2003,
according to a BBC series which will be broadcast this
month.

The revelation comes after Mr Bush launched an
impassioned attack yesterday in Washington on Islamic
militants, likening their ideology to that of
Communism, and accusing them of seeking to "enslave
whole nations" and set up a radical Islamic empire
"that spans from Spain to Indonesia". In the
programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which
starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign
minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud
Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian
President: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God
would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists
in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me,
'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

And "now again", Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two,
"I feel God's words coming to me: 'Go get the
Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their
security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by
God, I'm gonna do it."

Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had
a "moral and religious obligation" to act. The White
House has refused to comment on what it terms a private
conversation. But the BBC account is anything but
implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr
Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the
importance of his faith.

From the outset he has couched the "global war on
terror" in quasi-religious terms, as a struggle between
good and evil. Al-Qa'ida terrorists are routinely
described as evil-doers. For Mr Bush, the invasion of
Iraq has always been part of the struggle against
terrorism, and he appears to see himself as the
executor of the divine will.

He told Bob Woodward - whose 2004 book, Plan of Attack,
is the definitive account of the administration's road
to war in Iraq - that after giving the order to invade
in March 2003, he walked in the White House garden,
praying "that our troops be safe, be protected by the
Almighty". As he went into this critical period, he
told Mr Woodward, "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 will be as good a messenger of His will as possible.
And then of course, I pray for forgiveness."

Another telling sign of Mr Bush's religion was his
answer to Mr Woodward's question on whether he had
asked his father - the former president who refused to
launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving
Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what
to do.

The current President replied that his earthly father
was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there
is a higher father that I appeal to".

The same sense of mission permeated his speech at the
National Endowment of Democracy yesterday. Its main
news was Mr Bush's claim that Western security services
had thwarted 10 planned attacks by al-Qa'ida since 11
September 2001, three of them against mainland US.

More striking though was his unrelenting portrayal of
radical Islam as a global menace, which only the forces
of freedom - led by the US - could repel. It was
delivered at a moment when Mr Bush's domestic approval
ratings are at their lowest ebb, in large part because
of the war in Iraq, in which 1,950 US troops have died,
with no end in sight.

It came amid continuing violence on the ground, nine
days before the critical referendum on the new
constitution that offers perhaps the last chance of
securing a unitary and democratic Iraq. "The militants
believe that controlling one country will rally the
Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate
governments in the region" and set up a radical empire
stretching from Spain to Indonesia, he said.

The insurgents' aim was to "enslave whole nations and
intimidate the world". He portrayed Islamic radicals as
a single global movement, from the Middle East to
Chechnya and Bali and the jungles of the Philippines.

He rejected claims that the US military presence in
Iraq was fuelling terrorism: 11 September 2001 occurred
long before American troops set foot in Iraq - and
Russia's opposition to the invasion did not stop
terrorists carrying out the Beslan atrocity in which
300 children died.

Mr Bush also accused Syria and Iran of supporting
radical groups. They "have a long history of
collaboration with terrorists and they deserve no
patience". The US, he warned, "makes no distinction
between those who commit acts of terror and those who
support and harbour them because they're equally as
guilty of murder".

"Wars are not won without sacrifice and this war will
require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve," Mr
Bush declared. But progress was being made in Iraq,
and, he proclaimed: "We will keep our nerve and we will
win that victory."


---


http://www.alternet.org/story/140221/bush's_shocking_biblical_prophecy_emerges%3A_god_wants_to_%22erase%22_mid-east_enemies_%22before_a_new_age_begins%22

May 24, 2009
Alternet.org

Clive Hamilton

Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: 
God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical
creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East
and must be defeated.

The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald
Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret
wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a
question. Why did he believe he could influence
President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George
Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs 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 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
Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice
from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the
University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer 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.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the
campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President
saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to
prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions
across the Middle East that the United States is on a
crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior
at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the
exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His
father, George H.W. Bush had also been a "Bonesman", as
indeed had his father. Skull & Bones' initiates are
assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush
Senior's nickname? "Magog".