God plus oil?

What a combination !!

Dick Cheney's quest for oil and George Bush's quest to carry out God's will. That's what led us to invade Iraq. Protecting us from terrorists had little to do with it. That's just how they sold it to a frightened, gullible Congress and the American people.

Cheney and the NeoCon roadmap to secure Mideast oil has been well documented by fellow blogger Mickey Nardo and others.

Now, I just stumbled upon this article on the website of the Council for Secular Humanism, written by James Haught, editor of the Charleston (WV) Gazette. Some excerpts:

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
by James A. Haught

Incredibly, 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 episode occurred 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.
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Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.
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The French revelation jibes with other known aspects of Bush’s renowned evangelical certitude. For example, a few months after his phone call to Chirac, Bush attended a 2003 summit in Egypt. The Palestinian foreign minister later said the American president told him he was “on a mission from God” to defeat Iraq. At that time, the White House called this claim “absurd.”

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5

Well, I'm not sure what to say about this. Like so many things, it could be exaggerated, distorted, taken out of context -- but I doubt it's totally made up. And it doesn't really tell us anything new. But it certainly does fill in a gap. Bush himself, of course, was also an "oil man" and maybe needed no further motive. But he was also a "God man" -- or at least posed as one -- and it would not surprise me if he really did see this as a mission from God.

What a combination !! Cheney's Oil and Bush's God.

And what a result !! More than 4,300 Americans dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, an international reputation in shreds, a country desolated, a population displaced, and $1,000,000,000,000 of our treasury down the drain.

Ralph