This Free Inquirer article has been making the rounds among atheists and agnostics on the net. In it, a senior editor of the magazine James A. Haught claims that back in 2003 when then U.S. President Bush was trying to assemble his “Coalition of the Willing” to invade Iraq, he told the French President of the time Jacques Chirac that Iraq had to be attacked because the Biblical demons Gog and Magog was at work in Iraq and that the confrontation was willed by God.

To the writer’s credit, the article details explicitly how this information was obtained so it’s hard to dismiss it as just hearsay. Still, I find it hard to believe that Bush actually meant it seriously. It’s one thing for Bush to throw in the Gog and Magog thing as a half joke, quite another thing to use it as justification to implore France to take action against Iraq. After all, why would Bush have expected Chirac to understand the obscure Biblical reference? It should also be noted that Chirac has a history of being quite derisive towards Bush’s religious beliefs, so mischaracterizing what he actually said would not be entirely out of the question.

Far from it for me to defend Bush’s record, it’s just that I believe in appropriating both blame and credit fairly and truthfully. For me, what is both more credible and ultimately more insidious are the accompanying revelations that the U.S. military regularly uses Biblical language in its reports. Quotes from the Bible for example are often used as prefaces to reports especially when it is known that the superior officer who will be reading them is a devout Christian. This practice apparently dates back from before the Bush era but seems to have become more common under his presidency. Needless to say, any attempt to reframe the mission and purpose of the U.S. military in Biblical terms, ignoring the separation of church and state, should make any reasonable person extremely nervous.