Sunday, August 09, 2009
The Vision of Ezekiel by Raphael
During the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush and members of his administration gave a variety of justifications for military action, which can best be summed up as “Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons and even nuclear weapons that he plans to give to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda who will then smuggle them into the United States and kill tens of thousands of people.” Opponents of the invasion suspected Bush was actually motivated by a desire to control Iraq’s large oil reserves. However, according to reports out of Switzerland and France, President Bush appears to have been inspired by another source: Biblical prophecy.
Apparently, while trying to drum up international support for the invasion of Iraq, Bush placed a phone call to the president of France, Jacques Chirac, and presented a series of arguments to convince the French president to join Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing.” In the course of the conversation, according to an English-language translation, Bush told Chirac, “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."
Chirac, a Catholic, didn’t understand what Bush, an Evangelical Christian, was talking about, and asked his staff to find out who Gog and Magog were and what they meant to the U.S. president. Chirac’s staff contacted the Biblical Service of the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn called Thomas Römer, a Professor of Theology at the University of Lausanne and a specialist in the Old Testament. Römer was asked to prepare a one-page report on the subject of Gog and Magog to be shown to the president of France.
Römer maintained silence about the incident until Chirac left office in May 2007, after which the professor revealed the story in an interview with the University of Lausanne’s school magazine, Allez savoir!. Earlier this year, Chirac confirmed the story in a book, Si vous le répétez, je démentirai... : Chirac, Sarkozy, Villepin [If You Repeat It, I’ll Deny It] by Jean-Claude Maurice.
So, for those to whom the allusion is not obvious, what did Bush mean when he referred to Gog and Magog? Gog and Magog appear in the prophetic Book of Ezekiel 38-39, and the section is open to various interpretations. Gog is the human personification of evil who will lead a multinational invasion of Israel from the north and be defeated, with great violence, by God, who will restore Israel’s security. Magog refers to the land from which Gog hails. To George Bush, Gog and Magog probably meant the ultimate future battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, a battle that had been predicted more than 2,500 years earlier, but whose time had finally come.
Chirac, who had sent French troops to support Bush’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, was not convinced this time, and refused to join Bush’s Coalition of the Willing.
-David Wallechinsky
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush (by James A. Haught, Council for Secular Humanism)
Did He Feel Hand of God? (by Mitch Potter, Toronto Star)
Early 2003: Chirac Asks Theologian to Explain George W. Bush's Reference to Gog and Magog (Sedulia’s Translations)
George W. Bush et le Code Ezéchiel (by Jocelyn Rochat, Allez savoir!) (PDF) [French original]
Ezekiel 38-39 (New American Standard Bible) (BibleGateway.com)
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