Iraq, Nostradamus – New Crusades and Quagmires

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Friends,
There are new columns of smoke arising in Baghdad. They are no longer the inky apocalyptic clouds of flaming oil pits set alight in a desperate attempt of a moribund dictatorship to mask the city from US smart bombs. The new columns of smoke ascend from the flaming wreckage of US trucks and personnel carriers that almost daily fall prey to guerrilla attacks. The preemptive US war against Iraq has come and gone and it would seem that many of my interpretations of prophecies from Nostradamus and others are playing out. Saddam’s government fell quickly. US priority “was” placed on getting the oil flowing from Iraq before restoring water and power and social order to its people. The invasion was quick and turned out to be the easier venture than the murky postwar occupation. And, as I feared, Iraq now descends into the guerrilla war I predicted would follow the invasion. Iraq has become the new Mecca of pilgrimage for militant Islam. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations will continue sending their irregulars across the Iraqi border seeking a baptism of fire and a taste for American blood.

Terrorism in the world has escalated, not diminished, after the US occupation of Iraq. Moreover, it would seem that even so-called civilized countries have adopted the terrorist military taste for preemptive attack without an objective cause. Each day, week, month, passes with no proof to back up President Bush’s motivation for this war. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have apparently become weapons of mass occultation, soon to become weapons of amassed fictions.

At least the oil is real. It hasn’t vanished into thin air.

In January 2003, I did an interview for LauraLee Online where one of my predictions earned a lot of angry emails. On the show I predicted that people of the future would label America’s planned invasion of Iraq as the first stage of its “Oil Wars.” I said these imperial adventures intended to prop US-friendly puppet democracies first in Iraq, then Iran and Saudi Arabia with the US strategic goal of dramatically lowering fossil fuel prices while increasing the flow of oil to US industries. (Oh, before I forget, I might also add Liberia to the mix. A few thousand US troops will be arriving there shortly, as it is yet another failed country needing our “help” that according to the BBC sits on a recently discovered and potentially rich oil reserve.)

Here we are a little over two months after President Bush declared the war in Iraq officially over on 1 May and those angry emails about my “Oil War” prediction have vanished faster than an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction. The oil of Iraq flows under US control. Vice President Dick Cheney’s former oil company, Halburton, has received contracts to rebuild and modernize Iraq’s oil industry without any other bids being considered by the White House. Back in the latter half of April, US Marines and army units of the 1st Armored and 3rd Divisions entered Baghdad with specific orders to secure the buildings and records of only one Iraqi government agency. They did not receive orders from the Bush administration to secure the hospitals, nor the administrative offices overseeing the water systems or food distribution. The Marines did not protect the national archives or the museums. Law and order were not their first priority, nor was sustaining food, power, water or protecting cultural heritage of the Iraqi people. They left the ministries that supply these needs and the museums wide open to plundering mobs. They left the “liberated” citizens of Baghdad at the mercy of darkened streets filled with hooligans and the looters for weeks on end. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians died in the coming chaos. The only assets of the Iraqi people carefully guarded by the invaders were the buildings of the Ministry of Oil.

The English newspaper The Guardian reported on 3 June 2004 that US Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, publicly admitted that oil was the fundamental reason for the invasion. According to their sources, Wolfowitz–one of the founding fathers of the US Neo-Concervative “new world order” agenda–made the following comment in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore. He was asked to explain why America was ready to attack Iraq but not North Korea. Unlike the dictator of Iraq, the dictator of North Korea had a well-known and documented nuclear, biological and chemical weapons stockpile and the capability to launch them at America and its Far Eastern allies.

Wolfowitz replied, “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

Even two months into the occupation it is not unfair to say that US soldiers guard the pipelines, not the people of Iraq.

Using the “C” Word
Two days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on America, Wolfowitz’s chief disciple, the US president, indelicately defined his war against Islamist terrorism as “a great crusade.”

How can I explain to those of you who are not Islamic or Arab how ominous the “C” word sounds when used by the world’s most powerful Christian leader? It doesn’t matter that Bush applies the term for a war against a few extremists in the Islamic world. The Middle East looks back 1,000 years upon the bloody Christian crusades — the “preemptive” Christian colonial holy wars in the Middle East — as if they took place yesterday. Imagine if Bush had declared a “holocaust” on a few Jewish terrorists, not intending to implicate the whole Jewish people? How would a majority of Jews view his use of the “H” word? Arabs watch and wait for signs of a crusade happening again, just as Jews are ever vigilant for the signs of a new Holocaust.

Perhaps Nostradamus foresaw Bush’s “Crusade”
Over four-and-a-half centuries ago, Nostradamus said the following in Century 3, Quatrain 61 of his prescient masterpiece Les Propheties

La grande bande & ƒecte crucigere,
Se dreƒƒera en Meƒopotamie:
Du proche fleuue compagnie legere,
Que telle loy tiendra pour ennemie.

The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia:
Of the nearby river the fast company,
That such law will hold for the enemy.

It would seem that Nostradamus has written a compound prophecy embracing two modern invasions of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) into one: the Gulf War of 1991 and the land invasion and occupation of Iraq via its southern (Mesopotamian) approaches in 2003.

Back in 1997, I wrote the following interpretation of C3 Q61 for Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies. My views then covered what now appear to be the first part of this compound prophecy:

“It could be said that Operation Desert Storm was the most recent Crusade of Christian armies in the Middle East; moreover, it starred the largest cast of Christian soldiers ever to fight in ‘Mesopotamia’ in the 20th or any other century. Rick Atkinson in his book Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War estimates that the West sent 4,000 tanks, 150 ships, and 600,000 soldiers (the vast majority from the Christian nations). The ‘nearby river’ is the Euphrates during the rapid attack by the 101st Airborne Division cutting across Highway 8 next to the river. This action effectively cut Saddam Hussein’s supply line to Kuwait during the 100-hour ground war. The final line may take us into the near future if we can define just which ‘law’ holds in Iraq: Is it the brutal ‘law’ of Saddam Hussein, or the sanctions of the United Nations? One could argue that the swiftness of the Allied encircling maneuver spearheaded by the 101st Airborne helped bring the conflict to an end before Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard divisions were destroyed. After the peace, he could use these relatively intact elite units to tighten his hold on Iraq.”

A revision of my interpretation would include a second invasion and occupation. Line 1 and 2’s phrase “great host and sect of the crusaders will be massed in Mesopotamia” is more applicable to the US forces occupying the region today. I believe President Bush’s use of the word “crusade” is a classic catch phrase Nostradamus wouldn’t have overlooked. Moreover, it is an objective fact mostly overlooked by the American media that a major invasion of Christian missionaries and aid organizations is at this moment taking place in Iraq. Andrew Gumbel’s 22 April article for the UK newspaper The Independent estimates that the Southern Baptist Convention had already sent 800 missionary volunteers to Iraq even as the American invasion was still ongoing. Gumbel was told by SBC sources that the missionaries were “on their way to Iraq to deliver food packages labeled with a verse from St. John’s Gospel, in Arabic, saying that ‘grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.’”

The Christian charity called Samaritan’s Purse will also soon pass food and the Christian faith to the Iraqis. Franklin Graham, evangelist Billy Graham’s son runs it. Franklin Graham is more than a long-standing friend of Bush. He is a significant theological mentor. Bush has written in Christian magazines that Reverend Franklin and his father were pivotal in renewing his faith and religious committment as a Christian after his bout with alcoholism. The American public choose to be blithley unaware of Graham’s hatred of Islam. After the 9-11 attacks, and around the same time Bush declared his war on Islamist terrorists a “crusade,” Franklin Graham made a highly publicized blanket condemnation of Islam on the Christian TV show 700 Club calling it “a very evil and wicked religion.” He has often written that Islam and Christianity will fight each other before the second coming of Christ. Franklin Graham, like his father, who has been the confessor of several American presidents, believes Christ’s coming is imminent.

Given the indelicate words of this prominent Islamaphobe, one might expect the president to distance himself, but no. Gumbel reports that the president invited Franklin Graham to preach at the Good Friday 2003 prayer service held in the Pentagon. I would add that he participated in the Holy Service just as the American invasion of an Islamic country was at its peak.

Gumbel reports that Graham’s invitation insulted many moderate Christians and members of other faiths working at the Pentagon. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the president’s invitation sent “entirely the wrong message to the Muslim and Arab world…”

“This kind of incident,” Hooper added, “ can undo any kind of bridges built by a hundred public affairs officers at the Pentagon.”

Thus, it seems we “have” a new crusade in Mesopotamia, as Nostradamus defined it in Century 3, Quatrain 61.

Lines 1 through 3 point to the Gulf War of 1991 repeating itself in early 2003:

The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia:
Of the nearby river the fast company…

Fast armored armadas of the Mesopotamian encirclement of Republican Guard divisions in 1991 become leaner and meaner armored brigades of the U.S. blitzkrieg of 2003. They plunge across the Mesopotamian delta heading north, northwest for Baghdad alongside the western bank of the Euphrates (“nearby river”).

At the date of this writing a “great host” is indeed “amassed in Mesopotamia.” At the end of the war there were close to 200,000 soldiers, the vast majority being of the Christian faith (“crusaders”) on the ground in Mesopotamia. Since 1 May the Bush administration scaled down the number of troops to 145,000. An escalation of guerilla warfare sets the stage for history to repeat itself. Another US president from Texas is issuing secret orders for a buildup of more troops for what could be America’s second Vietnam quagmire.

Perhaps the repetition of history is closer than I’ve stated it. When US troops crossed the Euphrates River on their final push for Baghdad, they passed into the fertile and marshy planes of the Tigris and Euphrates watershed.

“Gosh!” remarked one reporter on camera from CNN riding on top of an armored personel carrier through yellowish green rice fields and palm groves, “It looks just like we’re driving right back into Vietnam!”

Is he right?

Let us review the prophecy again:

The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia [modern day Iraq]:
Of the nearby river the fast company,
That such law will hold for the enemy.

The final line seen in the light of the 2003 invasion, becomes more ominous for America. Indeed, a clearer picture arises of just what Nostradamus might intend for the “law” that will “hold for the enemy.” Saddam’s dictatorial “law” survived the Gulf War of 1991 only to be replaced by a new tyranny–the “Sharia” law of Shiite fundamentalism.

The law of the Sharia will hold Iraq because the American president’s preemptive war and occupation is the catalyst. A force-fed Iraqi puppet democracy will radicalize the country. The guerrilla insurrection will grow in strength long after the US captures or kills Saddam. This insurrection may be the match setting the fires of a 27-year war foreseen by Nostradamus in his famous “Mabus” and “Third Antichrist” prophecies.

See related articles in the HogueProphecy Bulletin Archives:

Who will be Mabus, the Third Antichrist?

The Axis of Evil, the Terrorist Triumvirate and Future Russian/American Alliances…

Is Bush Mabus?

A Portent for War

John Hogue
(11 July 2003)

Books by John Hogue