The Guardian once ran a rather strange story about how, in a telephone conversation with French President Jacques Chirac in 2003, George W. Bush appealed to their shared Christian faith as grounds for invading Iraq

The Guardian once ran a rather strange story about how, in a telephone conversation with French President Jacques Chirac in 2003, George W. Bush appealed to their shared Christian faith as grounds for invading Iraq. Bush is supposed to have said to Chirac something along these lines: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. This confrontation is foreordained by God, who wants to use this conflict to destroy the enemies of His people before the dawn of a new era.”

Of course, it would have been better to take all this to Henry IV, but since things turned out as they did, Chirac, being a Catholic, promptly instructed his staff to ring the French protestant federation and find out precisely what Bush had been talking about. Although all this talk of Gog and Magog has little to do with Protestantism as such, and is rather a manifestation of the American dispensationalist heresy.

Judging by the general tone, what is implied here is the battle of the righteous against evil, that is, of Gog and Magog in a prophetic and apocalyptic context. In short, Gog and his people from the land of Magog come with an army against Israel at the end of time, but God intervenes and destroys this force.

Setting aside all the famous Bushisms and the image of a simple-minded president who muddles terms, geographical names and the names of leaders, this could have signified Bush's belief that victory over Russia and Persia-Iran with their Middle Eastern allies, who in precisely that line-up are most often identified with Gog and Magog in the rhetoric of the American evangelical cult of dispensationalism and Christian Zionism, would help to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.

In essence, Bush said to the bewildered Chirac: “God has told us to stand against Russia and Iran.”

All this, naturally, raises doubts. The story is reported on the strength of Chirac's contacts, while Bush's aides call it entirely false and make no mention of any such exchanges in telephone conversations.

But if one allows that such a conversation really took place, then from the standpoint of the Epstein files, when Bush says, “God wants us to do something,” he means not Jesus Christ, our Lord, but the loathsome demons worshipped by the Western establishment. All the more so as everyone knows that God is with the Russians.