How easy to forget: "God wants to erase his enemies"

septimus · July 31, 2011, 8:55am

In a recent thread someone asked for evidence that George W. Bush thought in Apocalyptic terms. I posted part of this strange account from Jacques Chirac’s book:

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. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal.

....In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir....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.

I was startled when I Googled and found the quote. But what should have been more startling is that I was startled: I was well aware of the quote and had thought it startling several years ago when I first saw it. The Doper I was responding to apparently had never seen it, and didn’t comment on it much. If this were a poll, one question I would have would be: Rank this GWB utterance on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means you agree with it and 10 means you’re flabbergasted such a cretin could be elected President.

Frankly, anyone who goes below 9½ on their answer to that question will strike me as wrong-headed.

I’m sure right-wingers are happy to put all this behind them. They never liked GWB, they’ll point out (though the reason is mainly that GWB was never lunatic enough for them).

Should I have posted this in GQ? The question being “Did Chirac, himself a President and prominent right-wingish statesman, really attribute these words to GWB?” It seems hard to believe he’d invent such a lie and allow it to propagate.

Should I post this in GD? I’m not sure where debate would focus, perhaps “How ashamed should Americans be that they elected this man?”

But what really struck me is: How easy it is to forget. I had known the quote from before, yet was still startled to rediscover it. Googling to get a better cite, I encountered a blog comment:

This comment seems misplaced. That we were capable of electing the man with the quote should be an important rude awakening for us. Instead, “been there … done that … get over it …”