Okay, So He Really Was Crazy

Or, like so many before him, driven mad by prophecy. The Guardian is reporting that when GW Bush was trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the French, the Shrub was doing it by using screwy biblical prophecy: Gog and Magog. To quote Andrew Brown:
In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government.
President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer.
He explained that Gog and Magog were, to use theological jargon, crazy talk. They appear twice in the Old Testament, once as a name, and once in a truly strange prophecy in the book of Ezekiel[.]

And, of course, the story just gets stranger--as is typical when talking about the Bush II Whitehouse.

War Crimes

It seems almost minor compared to the news on global warming and climate change, but The Guardian reports:

Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair's government's attempts to mislead the public.

They were so shocked by the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the invasion that they believe members of the British and US governments at the time could be prosecuted for war crimes by breaching the duty outlined in the Geneva convention to safeguard civilians in a conflict, the Guardian has been told.

The article is worth reading. I'd support prosecution, but hey, that's me.

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Human Smoke

Not the brilliant and horrifying book by Nicholson Baker, but the bodies stacked up in the streets of Iraq. According to a new study by ORB, a British research group, the violent death toll now stands at ~1.2 million dead. This is in line with the previous study by John Hopkins published in The Lancet. American soldiers are going through bullets so fast that the manufacturers can't keep up (seriously. you can check out the PDF report here).
The number of violently dead now puts Iraq in a class with Rwanda and is approaching the Cambodian killing fields.
But ask Americans how many dead there are and the numbers are so low as to defy belief. An AP poll showed the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The official number is ~54,000. Best epidemiological estimate is 1.2 million with ~56% of that due to American violence.