So America was being run by dangerous lunatics...

I am honestly surprised that it's taken six years for this ghastly story to be aired:

"The telephone rang. It was the head of the Biblical Service of the Protestant Federation of France [Service biblique de la Federation protestante de France]. She asked me if I could write a page on Gog and Magog for the French President." Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and specialist in the Old Testament, had just been plunged into the midst of international politics. This apparently banal theological inquiry had unsuspected ramifications, for it was incited by George W. Bush.

"The prophecies are being accomplished."

"I also learned during this phone call that the President of the United States had brought up Gog and Magog in a conversation with Jacques Chirac. The discussion was about current events in the Middle East. After having explained that he saw Gog and Magog at work, George W. Bush added that the Biblical prophecies were coming to pass," Thomas Römer continues.

This conversation, which also included the Axis of Evil, took place at the beginning of 2003, a few weeks before the American intervention in Iraq. George W. Bush was then trying once again to convince Jacques Chirac to follow him in his Operation Just Cause, which the Frenchman obstinately refused to do.

I need a new initialism. YFG. Ye fucking gods. Naturally, the French president, not being a religious lunatic, had no idea what Bush was talking about. So he had to contact a religious scholar to explain Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.

I mean, I have a sympathetic view of Bush, which is to say that I think that he was a basically simpleminded, credulous man who, due to his upbringing, found himself elevated to power in the company of dangerous war criminals. But this! This is absurd, embarrassing, and appalling. He wanted to invade a sovereign country due to some vague suspicion that some biblical events were coming to pass.

And what is that about Gog and Magog, anyway?

An uncertain and unclear text

"I wrote a one-page paper which explained the theological foundations of Gog and Magog, two creatures who appear in Genesis and especially in two very obscure chapters of the Book of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament," the UNIL theologian remembers, before adding that on more than one account, Ezekiel is a disconcerting book.

"The transcription which has come down to us is not certain, the names that are cited pose a problem, and the text is difficult," Thomas Römer adds. If that were not enough to embroil the 21st-century reader, this book "also contains a message that is a bit hidden. It is part of a kind of writing that speculates on the future, in a cryptic language, and is destined for initiates," the UNIL researcher explains.

However, it is not necessary to be an expert in esoteric studies to understand the outline of this apocalyptic prophecy. In chapters 38 and 39, the authors of the Book of Ezekiel added a vision according to which a great world army will form, and that this coalition of peoples will bring a final battle upon Israel. "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to take advantage of this conflict to wipe out the enemies of his people before a new age begins," Thomas Römer goes on.

So, basically, this insanity has only the thinnest textual foundations. Moreover, Bush wasn't the first president to buy into this madness:

Before [Bush], another American president [also] believed in the imminent realization of Ezekiel's prophecy.

"As Ronald Reagan knew the Bible well, he believed that the Cold War and the existence of the atomic bomb made it possible for the prophecy of Ezekiel to come to pass, therefore that the moment had come," Thomas Römer continues.

Someone less appalled than me - say, Slavoj Zizek - would note that this delusional irrationality actually camouflages a type of rationality, one concerned with "geopolitics, ratios of power, and oil pipeline maps". It serves a purpose in legitimizing it to a (certain) domestic political audience, and defuses domestic opposition (to a certain extent) by focusing it on the religious irrationality, rather than the underlying imperialist logic.

Reagan's administration played that game expertly, trotting out a senile old man as the public face of a set of dangerous gambles and questionably legal maneuvers. (Arms buildup, Iran-Contra, etc) While the left spent its contempt on Reagan himself and the religious right adored him for his end-times simplicity of purpose, a set of astute, unprincipled negotiators and hatchet-men carried out the real work.

The Bush administration dropped the ball, in a way. It employed a set of twisted monstrosities who spent the 90s calling for a revival of a territorial American empire. The international community knew that the neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc) weren't to be trusted. So the administration used Colin Powell, a generally principled man, as its messenger. And when that wouldn't work, it had to front up with Bush himself, who didn't have the native wit to say anything better than this horseshit about Gog and Magog.

With luck, his failure to convince the French that the end times really were here presaged the end of this model of politics, but I'm not hopeful. Religious lunacy and foreign-policy imperialism have had a long and successful marriage in America...