Usama bin Laden.

Usama bin Laden (above), Saddam Hussein. Which one is Nostradamus' Arab Prince of Evil?

Friends,
The future and the events they anticipate are having a convergence. The prophecies of Nostradamus about his Third and Final Antichrist, code named Mabus now pit the two front-runners, the late Saddam Hussein and the recently killed Usama (Osama) bin Laden, in an ever-closer race to be number one candidate for Antichrist. Usama is catching up with Saddam.

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560:

2 Q62
Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete.

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible unraveling of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77
L’antechrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre.

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.
The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,
Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that Saddam and Usama tally up to be candidate number one. (A full examination of all the Nostradamus Antichrist prophecies and potential past and future candidates can be had by reading my e-book. Click on Antichrist.

Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone both share. Both violently annihilated: Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006, Usama shot by US Navy seals on May Day 2011.

(Score Saddam 1, Usama 1)

Both men’s names can be found in the code name Mabus. Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas. Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus. Usama mixed around get us maaus. Take the b from bin Laden. Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

(Score Saddam 2, Usama 2)

The horrible undoing of people and animals has not been made clear. It could imply the times in which they died, when the earth is seeing the balance of nature (animals) unraveling in devastating climate change caused by human abuse of the planet and overpopulation (people). There are many prophecies in Nostradamus about natural disasters, superstorms of terrible winds, global warming, vast inner-continental droughts at latitude 48 degrees across the world, all leading to a global famine and a third world war that may see two-thirds of the human race consumed.

It is not made clear in the prophecies if the Antichrist and the war arising from his annihilation triggers this unraveling of civilization and mass animal extinctions from a global catastrophe he caused. Indeed, the fact that Nostradamus does not directly tie the Third Antichrist to nearly 100 prophecies on this theme except for the nebulous connection made in 2 Q62 indicates to me that the unraveling of people and animals describes the times in which the Antichrist’s added catastrophe of a post mortem war takes place.

This however does not ignore the potential of either some terrible terrorist reprisal (in the case of Usama) or an unraveling of the Arab world because of a future breakup of Saddam’s Iraq as causes for the unraveling of the world. Saddam had famously predicted before being hanged that without his strong hand and dictatorship, Kurd, Shia and Sunni Iraqi’s would not be able to govern themselves and that sooner or later, Iraq would unravel. If the Middle East unravels, so does the oil industry that fuels human civilization. So, for now, I referee that the score is still tied. I conclude that 2 Q62, line 2 is dating the times in which the Antichrist dies, when humans and animals are enduring an unraveling of natural balances of the planet.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

At once there is vengeance?

Saddam’s death did not see “immediately after” an unraveling of people and animals. We wait to see if this will happen in the next few months or years after the death of Usama. Score remains the same:

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

The line saying at once there will be vengeance is openly vague to embrace a future act of vengeance in retaliation to the killing of the Antichrist. One cannot say vengeance actually came from supporters of dead Saddam, although the worst years of the Iraqi sectarian civil war were ahead with the highest death tolls on Iraqis and US-coalition forces in the crossfire. Today saw the first reprisal bombings for Usama’s killing by Pakistani Taliban elements allied to al-Qaeda. Two suicide bombers killed scores of Pakistani Special Forces trainees as they gathered outside their boot camp facility in Western Pakistan to climb onto buses and minivans for a holiday. The death of 80 and the wounding of 100 of these does not fit the horrific reprisal implied that could ally 100 nations into an international counterattack. So, we are still waiting for something bigger to take place, perhaps in America — perhaps on or around the 10th anniversary of 9/11, or in al-Qaeda’s other favorite month to strike, the 11th month of each year.

No score change.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

Now, if line 3 of 2 Q62 and part of line 4 are implying an alliance of 100 nations taking vengeance on a history changing terrorist act, then I have to give Usama a point. After al-Qaeda’s hijacked jet takedown of the World Trade Center Towers and drilling of the Pentagon on 11 September 2011 — a terrifying crime dated and foreseen by Nostradamus, see Osama — President G. W. Bush collected 100 nations into his alliance to seek out and destroy Usama’s terrorist network. Shortly after, in a few months’ time, US forces and the Afghan Northern Alliance routed al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban regime that harbored them in Afghanistan. Usama and his surviving core of al-Qaeda were surrounded in caves on Mt Tora Bora. The survivors, including a wounded Usama, only just managed to sneak over into Pakistan where he spent nearly a decade in hiding, overseeing a greatly reduced and crippled al-Qaeda.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 4)

The last line of 2 Q62 returns to the theme of describing the times of the death of the Antichrist: a time of great climate disruption (thirst=drought), the crisis of potable water and famine looming for the an overpopulated world that will endure the birth of the 7th billionth thirsty and hungry child sometime around July of 2011. One might argue that this population milestone tilts the milestone in favor of Usama, however the climate has been unraveling since global temperatures spiked and kept spiking from 1998 onwards, including the year Saddam was hanged in 2006. So, no score change.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 4)

I will save the comet milestone at the end of 2 Q62 for last. Let us jump to the next quatrain.

We see in line one of 8 Q77, how it links the annihilation of Mabus to the annihilation of the “Third Antichrist”. They are one.

The chemical weapons plume over Halabja, Iraq.

Let us jump ahead to the verse’s final line. The blood-soaked human bodies and the reddened icy or white spotted rain on the hemorrhaging bodies is a phenomenon seen on those killed by biological or chemical agents. Although a reprisal for Usama’s death may use these agents, clearly, Saddam scores one here because he notoriously used such weapons against the Kurds in 1988 in Halabja, killing thousands of civilians and on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war perhaps killing and crippling 100,000 of them with mustard gas.

(Score: Saddam 4, Usama 4)

Now to 8 Q77′s line 3. This one leans in favor of Usama. He and his al-Qaeda jihadists are each considered by a vast majority of Muslims around the world as Al-muhartik (heretic). Since 9/11 to the present, most of the leading al-Qaeda planners, the cream of his suicide operatives who committed the act and thousands of AQ foot soldiers have been eliminated (dead), exiled from their countries of origin and made captives wasting away in a network of prisons far from home such as the US concentration camp at Guantanamo, Cuba.

Of course, one could argue that Saddam’s Baathist party henchmen are secular Islamic heretics also either eliminated, exiled from Iraq or crowded Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Nevertheless, Baathist dead and imprisoned have not made the historic impact of al-Qaeda dead and captives in a way that might have caught Nostradamus’ eye, so I give this one to Usama

(Score: Saddam 4, Usama 5)

Now to the most interesting new revelation in Nostradamus that only could be recognized after the death of Usama. Line 2 of 8 Q77 says about the Third Antichrist, “27 years his bloody war will last.”

Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran-Iraq War.

Saddam fulfills this. The time he was made dictator, to the time he was hanged was 27 years of constant warfare for Iraq. Saddam waged a civil war with the Kurds living inside its borders as well as crushing a second Shia uprising in 1991, killing hundreds of thousands. Saddam initiated the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989) killing a million people. He invaded Kuwait in 1990. He was thrown out of Kuwait with the loss of 150,000 soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands captured in the Persian Gulf War that followed in 1991. A low-grade war smoldered from 1991 to 2003 with US-Coalition patrolling a “No Fly Zone” over Iraqi airspace with occasional volleys of cruise missiles crashing into Baghdad in the mid and late 1990s. Then the US invaded Iraq in 2003 deposing Saddam’s regime. The Baathists fought a guerilla war with US occupiers then as Sunnis they grappled with the Shia in a bloody sectarian civil war at the time Saddam was hanged in late December 2006. A period of wars and civil wars that spanned exactly 27 years!

Score one for Saddam?

Not so fast!

New revelations have reached me today, which I have verified. Usama, back in 1984, established MAK (Maktab al-Khidamat) with Abdullah Azzam, an organization to raise funds and recruit a foreign legion of Arab mujahedeen fighters, mostly Saudi Arabs, to aid the Afghani mujahedeen’s guerilla war against Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Although Usama had been funding and fighting alongside Afghans since he completed college in 1979, MAK put Usama on history’s time map as a leader in a war — just the kind of prominence that a prophet from the 16th century would have recognized.

In 1984, Usama’s bloody war began, first with the Soviets, and then four years later, MAK became the foundation for creating and fundraising and recruiting al-Qaeda. Usama’s war shifted from Soviets and became a guerilla-terrorist war against Arab dictators, the Saudi King beholden to Western “Crusader” powers with a string terror bombings in the Middle East during the 1990s, as well as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Then came dramatic, large-scale swipes at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Then the USS Cole bombing at port in Yemen in 2000 killing and wounding dozens of US Navy personnel.

One of the 3,000 victims of Usama bin Laden on 9/11.

Then came his bloody war’s greatest terror act, the 9/11 toppling of the World Trade Center twin towers and setting alight the US Pentagon with hijacked civilian airliners killing 3,000. This lead to US occupation of Afghanistan in a war spanning nearly a decade, killing over 50,000 civilians and combatants from all sides. The drone wars over Western Pakistan commenced, killing hundreds more. The war in Afghanistan spilled over into a conflict between Taliban Pakistani guerillas with the Pakistani Army adding thousands to the butcher bomber’s bill.

Then Usama’s blood war ended with his death by US Navy Seal bullets just a dozen days ago.

Usama’s bloody war lasted from 1984 to 2011.

That is also 27 years!

Both Saddam and Usama win a point from me

(Score: Saddam 5, Usama 6)

Now to the last milestone. It is placed at the end of 2 Q62. Mabus is soon annihilated and all these events transpire “when the comet will pass.”

If we factor in how Nostradamus uses comets as portents, the most obvious allusion is not some comet we see in a telescope. It must be a great comet, one that is seen clearly with the naked human eye, like the one, for example, he successfully foresaw describing events in the future French Wars of Religion that could only happen under the unearthly glow of the great comet of 1577.

The early morning hours, just before the hanging of Saddam saw for the first time to the naked eye what would become the brightest comet in 60 years, Comet McNaught. There is no similar comet of singular brilliance seen by the naked eye at the death of Usama.

I know, I know. The emails will come flooding in about Comet Elenin, but it is not visible to the naked eye and will only become a visible smudge with a tale in late summer. No big light show like McKnaught is expected.

Yes, as it approaches the Sun it has been part of some pretty significant, and perhaps more than coinciding, surprises. As I detailed in my last blog, see Nostradamus, every time Elenin lined up with the Sun and Earth, there has been a significant earthquake on that day: the Chilean quake and Pacific Tsunami in February 2010, the Christchurch temblor in New Zealand, September 2010 and the Japanese quake and Pacific Tsunami of March 2011.

There will be two more opportunities for Elenin to trigger quakes of global significance come this September and November. If Elenin achieves a 5 and 0 on significant seismic events and tsunamis before it slips out of the solar system after November, then it could be considered the Mabus Comet and Usama bin Laden would score one on Saddam as Antichrist candidate number one. However, for now, I have to give a point to Saddam, because the comet allusions Nostradamus uses in other visions fits with this as a visible heavenly portent of the death of Mabus.

(Final Score, a tie: Saddam 6, Usama 6)

I have a new blog about prophecy and Meditation planned next. I will return to this “Antichrist, new Nostradamus revelations” theme sometime next week, current events willing. That is why it is good to join my free bulletin list and enjoy what thousands of others on the list receive: first notice of when a new blog is posted. Often these quickening times can upset and delay my planned postings with equally interesting new developments in prophecy’s take on our times. The bulletins will help me help you pick up the threads of this and any other series I mention that may not hit the blog page as originally planned, but later on.

'Adaluncatif' (Gaddafi Luna).

In that final blog on “Antichrist, new Nostradamus revelations”, we will see how the death of Usama bin Laden casts an entirely new light on the fate of Gaddafi. He is to die soon from a “dart” or “missile” not long after the death of bin Laden, it would seem, if one were to take a refreshed post-Usama-mortem review of the famous anagram prophecy Adaluncatif. See how it translates into Gaddafi Luna (Luna stands for crescent [of Islam]). Read also how Nostradamus’ Gaddafi riddles about the sea have been fulfilled by Usama bin Laden tying their fate in death together.

John Hogue

(Friday the 13, 2011)

PS–We are in the fifth month of 2011. Read how startlingly accurate Predictions for 2011 have been so far.

The US fallen air-transported home.

Friends,
They have retreated down the dusty desert road from whence they came. The last US combat brigade rolled back over the Kuwaiti border on a predawn hour, like the one that set rocket and artillery fire to the darkness seven years and five month ago when armored tank treads rolled into Iraq. This time the guards at the Kuwaiti border gate that unlocked and opened the Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion, pulled the gate closed after the last armored personnel carrier of the last retreating US armored combat unit had passed out of Iraq before MSNBC cameras. MSNBC was the only US cable news agency able to broadcast live what most of the US news media and American people would like to forget: the US war in Iraq.

The pullout ceremony jumped the official date by a few weeks to prevent any roadside bombs blasting the last exit of the last complete combat brigade. Despite that, the US leaves behind armed camps and air bases packed with 50,000 support troops and trainers to aid the reformed Iraqi army and military police forces to fight their own battles with guerrillas and jihadist insurgents. The departure of the US 4th Stryker Brigade from Iraq happened sometime after 3 AM in the morning of 19 August (Iraqi Time). It marked this as the 2,666th day after the previous US President G. W. Bush put on his bollocks-harnessing flight suit costume to stride bull-legged-cowboy style thumbing up the folks and the serried ranks of sailors, pilots and marines on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier displaying the “Mission Accomplished!” poster. He announced that combat missions in Iraq where at an end.

Well, according to what happened today, Mr. Bush was 7 years and 5 months off, 4,415 dead US service men and women buried, 318 coalition troops and 1,000 US contractors killed, 35,000 US and coalition wounded, and 650,000 Iraqis whacked after mission was prematurely “accomplished” on Mayday-Mayday! 1 May 2003.

At this moment in American denial, 70 percent of the people polled believe that the war ended in success. They also believe they paid way too much for the war, costing an estimated trillion dollars. Actually, the war is not yet a success and the American people have not paid the lion’s share of the cost. The Chinese did and we will owe them more than half of that sum as a loan with steep interest and soon!

Yes, the violence of civil sectarian strife reaching a climax in 2006-2007 has abated because of General Petraeus’ anti-insurgency successes that fortunately coincided with a “Sunni Iraqi awakening” to entering politics rather than stuffing RPG missiles into their tubes pointed at US humvees. Nevertheless, do not call the current dysfunctional and ungovernable Iraqi parliament in Baghdad evidence of victory, or that Iraq has become the symbol in the Muslim world of freedom and democracy that will illuminate and spread moderate democratic values across other Muslim Middle East nations

American Jarheads and G.I.s where supposed to dispose of Saddam Hussein with the garbage of WMD they could not find, guard US oil contractors as they drew out the Iraqi oil to pay for the war that they did not plumb and finally establish and leave behind a working democratic government that is not there. Elections happened this year in March in Iraq. Five months passed and STILL there is no government seated doing the Iraqi people’s pressing business. However, I will tell you what there is in its void, a new regional power. The Islamic fundamentalist government in Teheran openly sabotages progress towards forming an Iraqi Parliament for over five months now. The fall of Saddam brought on the rise of militant and powerful Islamic Revolutionary Iran dominating the Persian Gulf where much of the world’s oil exports lie.

We have won in Iraq?

NONE of the pivotal legislation has happened that would secure democracy and concord between the three major factions in the Iraq: The Sunni minority, the Shia Muslim majority and the non-Arab Kurds. The latter would prefer to live as their own nation and take back Kirkuk where most of Iraq’s oil reserves lay. Indeed, the all-important Shia-Sunni-Kurdish agreement to equally share Iraq’s oil revenues remains in limbo after years of all talk and no legislation. Soon American bureaucrats and military advisers will not be there to wave their fingers at them.

Actually, the official combat operations in Iraq will end after 31 August 2010 when another six thousand troops will fly out beyond the Stryker Brigade’s photo op “out” of Iraq this morning. The Pentagon will transfer power to the US State Department when on that day begins the new operation. From Operation Iraqi Freedom we will move to Operation New Dawn. In that new dawn on 1 September, thousands of State Department diplomats and technocrats will augment, the 50,000 US military trainers left behind in Iraq with a brighter, stronger and more subservient Blackwater-style army of 7,000 US private mercenaries. These will guard remaining US military assets until the end of 2011 when all US forces will leave Iraq to its own fate and devices. A sizable portion of those departing US troops belong to Army and Air Force personnel that flew missions over Iraqi unit counter-insurgency operations. The protection of righteous avenging angels on their shoulders will go with them. The commander of all Iraqi Army forces, Lieutenant-General Babakir Zebari, openly protested to the world press that Iraq’s military will not be ready to stand on its own until the year 2020.

The end of 2011 looks a lot like the beginning of 1973 when all US troops withdrew from defending the Republic of South Vietnam. Just as in Iraq, the US military and State Department buttressed and spent billions in a Vietnamization-cum-Baghdad-ification that intended leaving behind a workable government and armed forces to fight the suppressed forces of civil war after a rapid withdrawal, thank you very much.

The South Vietnamese government corrupt as it was did at least convene in Saigon. A national Iraqi government is still in the Bagh, dad, and bickering politicians show little sign of coming out to play parliament. The South Vietnamese armed forces, like their US manufactured and armed Iraqi descendants were left to fight guerrillas without the critical protection of a functioning air force. They fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. US air forces were in Vietnam (as they currently are in Iraq) the key to successful counterinsurgency activities of troops on the ground.

Today’s withdrawal of US combat forces in Iraq warrants a reprise of excerpts from one of my articles written seven years and nearly one month ago, posted on 11 July 2003, when the glow of “Mission Accomplished” began to feel the heat of bombed-out US humvees at the onset of the Iraqi insurrection against US occupying forces.

Here are some passages from New Quagmires and Crusades. You can read the whole article by clicking on Nostradamus Iraq.

***

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 & secte crucigere,
Se dressera en Mesopotamie:
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” [to describe his "war on terror" against those who attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center on 11 September 2001] is a classic catch phrase Nostradamus wouldn’t have overlooked.

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 [2003] the Bush administration scaled down the number of troops to 145,000. An escalation of guerrilla 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 personnel 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 Mabus).

***

Much of what I said posted on 11 July 2003 did happen. Saddam was caught and executed; the Shia majority that controls political power to this day even though they cannot govern the land after the US occupation supplanted the Sunni-dominated regime. The 27-year war may have already happened. If you take Saddam Hussein’s bloody, war ravaged reign, add to it the last three years of his life which marked some of the bloodiest days of the Iraqi insurgency until his death in late December 2006: his violent rule in perpetual warfare with his own people and neighbors lasted 27 years! Read more about what else Saddam Hussein clearly fulfilled in Nostradamus’ prophecies by clicking on Third Antichrist. According to these prophecies, there may be another 25-year war of the Antichrist coming after the 27-year conflict.

What have US combat troops left behind to stew in hot Iraqi deserts today? What will be waiting for Iraq when this second repetition of all-American blundering Vietnamization fills the void when the remaining US forces and support aircraft leave Iraq at the end of 2011?

The dire side of Mayan Calendar year 2012 has a new devilish dimension.

John Hogue

(19 August 2010)

PS–The Pentagon is at a crossroads. The future course of US strategic thinking and the destiny of the US military industrial complex will be decided in the latter-half of 2010. Read more about it in Predictions for 2010.

I like to parse out my astrologically bad news one blow at a time. The bad news for those who wish to hold onto the moribund past at all costs is good fortune for others of you who take these times as a challenge from existence to redefine and recreate yourself and then join others of like courage and celebration to recreate a better human civilization in harmony with nature. That is Uranus’ positive creed and gauntlet.

Uranus (either ruler of revolutionary change, or chaos and upheaval) is dipping into the sign of Aries (new beginnings and actions either innovative or hasty, launching either new enterprise or war). The transit will move in retrograde-reverse and leave Aries in mid-August this year, returning in 2011. I suspect we will be grateful for a breather to pause, prepare ourselves and reflect on what must be transformed inside and outside of us. Uranus’ passage through Aries will resume in March 2011 and keep goading and pushing us headlong through revolutionary times until May 2018. Then it gives us a five-month break before delivering one more kick in the pants forward beginning in the month marking the centennial anniversary of the end of the First World War — November 2018. Uranus finally exits Aries for good in March of 2019.

Jupiter photo from Pioneer 10 pass in 1973. The current white-out of the southern hemispheric brown cloud band is more wide spread. There are little to no streams of brown in it.

Starting 7 June 2010, Jupiter joins Uranus in exact conjunction, 0 degrees Aries. Conjunctions magnify the two planets’ potentials, especially when initially entering a new sign. You thus have the Change/Chaos giver joining forces with Jupiter, the expander of higher mindedness. Vast yet subtle forces are at play. By coincidence, this conjunction happens after the planet Jupiter has undergone a great change. These days we might rename the gas giant, “spot”. The southern brownish cloud band has faded to white, making the red spot of Jupiter, a storm the diameter of Earth, a lonely hurricane floating in a sea of white cloud roiling across Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. The last time this happened was in the early 1990s and when Pioneer 10 made a flyby of Jupiter in 1973.

Many of you can feel the Jupiter-Uranus effect coming on. Do you feel the past has somehow betrayed the future? Something’s got to give — got to breakthrough the dogmatic platitudes of priests, politicians, pundits, parents and smiley presidents? Do you feel like a butterfly desperate to expand, grow, fly free beyond the carapace conditioning within which the past-oriented society has imprisoned you? Do you want to become a force of change rather than talk about it? Do you see a world going unhinged if people don’t stop talking and start doing change, now?

If you do feel this pull to reform the self and the world, you may also feel frustration and get downright angry at another force that seems to inhibit breakthroughs and reform. Pluto is in Capricorn and it defines an era not seen in roughly 289 years when last the planet ruling collective transformation or degeneration of the human race transited the sign of business, executive power, utility and the creation of new kinds of political and religious order. An age of secular enlightenment leading to the American Revolution was born in the last Pluto-Capricorn transit.

New world religions are also born during such times. Two thousand years ago, Yeshua preached his sermons at the end of Pluto’s transit of Sagittarius. It was left to the apostles and St. Paul to get on with Capricorn business, fashioning an organized world religion out of what Yeshua had to share. They even changed his Hebrew name to better market the product in the Gentile world as that Greco-Roman brand, Jesus Christos.

As the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus remains exact through June and into July the 90-degree friction they have with Pluto in Capricorn will bring on an irresistible force of change clashing with an immovable force of establishment power. It must be remembered that these rare Pluto-in-Capricorn transits see the status quo test their strength to suppress a rising collective desire for reform. They do this either openly, as King George III of the British Empire ventured against his American subjects in the Thirteen Colonies; or, establishment powers do so as passive aggressives by simply disconnecting with their people, whilst going on habitually promising change but abusing power in the same old way, feeling your pain one moment and forgetting you the next.

You see this happening now in Iraq. The people voted for a new parliament three months ago. Parliament appointees argue and debate what kind of government to form in the comfort and security of Baghdad’s Green Zone. They have running water. Their electricity is on 24/7. They do not go hungry, but on the streets of Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, all government systems are in limbo until the elected government governs. People feel that they are not heard and wonder why they voted after all. The car bombs and despair is coming back. Uranus squared Pluto is ripe for domestic and international acts of terrorism not seen since 9/11. The kind of frustration that happens in Iraq can happen in America this summer.

If you read the comments of my European readers at the PIIGGS blog page, you will hear a common grievance that the EU government is acting like a new aristocracy passing rules and regulations beyond what people say they want or need. There is a feeling of powerlessness in the face of this growing state of disconnect. If European aristocracies of the past are a cautionary tale, stray a little further and popular revolution follows. I do not see revolution yet, but Europe will have a hotter than normal summer of strikes and riots this summer.

Just when this Jupiter-Uranus square with Pluto began, President Obama walked an empty beach in Louisiana, devoid of holiday sunbathers, the ocean horizon empty of crab and shrimp boats. He wore immaculately clean dress slacks, polished shoes and a white shirt. Tie-less, surrounded by bureaucrats and brass (no unemployed fishermen or folk employed by tourism industry in sight) he beach combed for signs of the oil disaster. There was an iconic moment that I predict will haunt the president in the future. He turned his back to the sea where a slick larger than the state of Pennsylvania keeps spreading unabated to stoop down taking a gander at a recently swept beach to press a finger against a small dime-sized bit of tar that his bureaucrat and military brass handlers brought to his attention.

Hmmm. There it is! The oil slick, Mr. President.

Source: AP.

The forces of Uranus declare: You were not out in the wetlands where you might really smell it, get your nice white shirt dirty with rotting blood-colored goo, or see your nattily attired shoulder stained with a tear or two from people that you might hold and comfort. They may lose their livelihoods and culture. You won’t. Uranus conjoined with Jupiter demands this June and July that cerebral “President Spock” be a little less Vulcan and more like the decisive Captain James T. Kirk. Change your Star Trek personal metaphor this summer, Mr. President. Stop being the “President Spoke” and become the President “do”.

During the summer of this square, governments become even more disconnected with their people and more full of talk about being otherwise disengaged. The people will become outright angry about it. When Uranus squares Pluto a climate of upheaval spreads across all walks of life. Outbursts will be seismic and sudden. Governments and leaders in an instant can fall from political earthquakes. Popes can fall to religious temblors of protest. A financial European Union may shrink or collapse from national mutinies.

In Predictions for 2010, I foresaw in detail how oil prices would be the source of the next economic global crisis approaching in October. I add here that an oil industry can plunge into economic crisis either from the growing natural disaster of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill or from a more active hurricane season than expected sending oil-festered tidal surges over the coasts of Louisiana and Eastern Texas. Most US oil refineries are in its path.

What existence is first trying to teach us this summer with a Jupiter/Uranus square of Pluto is to confront reality. Our spiritual, social, economic and ecological systems are heading for systemic failure. Time to sound the alarm, to bring together genius, to “under-stand” and see what is the source to all of our problems so they can be transcended.

The word systemic is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as: 1. Of or pertaining to a system or systems. 2. Of, pertaining to, or affecting the entire body. The word system comes from the Greek susteema, a composite whole, from sunistanai, to bring together, combine: sun-, together + histanai, to cause to stand.

The Uranus square Pluto will shake us hard and long. Wake up and smell the real Aquarian Age, not this airy-fairy, twenty-twelvie kindergarten claptrap fomented for a quarter century by Pollyanna pundits of the New Age. There are problems that crystals and positive thinking alone cannot alter. They need a new consciousness and intelligence coming from a space of enlightenment even the New Age messengers have never plumbed.

The fabric of our consciousness to bring change is sabotaged by a hidden darkness. A blind spot is placed on our IN-sight. Dysfunctional education dulls us from birth onwards making us unaware of this invisible trap of mind.

Most prophecy watchers seek to find Nostradamus’ third and final Antichrist in his version of the apocalypse. What if he is not really a personification of any world leader or anyone else other than an imposed state of mind imprinted in each of us caught unawares every moment by this hidden blindness to the dark? We are jacked into this Matrix of ego-mind that is Antichrist. Uranus in Aries for the better part of this decade plays Morpheus inviting Neo behind the mask of “Mr. Anderson” to be free of this Matrix. Uranus can show us just how far down the rabbit whole of human id goes the invisible shadow of the Antichrist Unconscious. We can then “unjack” ourselves once we know its nature.

The choice is yours. You can take the blue pill and keep living in a dream world of the Antichrist Unconscious, pretending it is anything but a dream, or…

Take the red pill of meditation. I found my Morpheus. I have taken it. It is in my hand and only an email away from being in yours.

Revolution rather than react-illusion is the way of Uranus. The god of change can be a holy chaos if we do not listen, or he can be a radical catalyst in ways we can scarcely imagine.

There is nothing more radical than remaking a world where Christ conscious Buddhas see they are Buddhas, pretending not to be and stop the pretense with blissful understanding.

A new humanity will create a new civilization that will mark the summer of 2010 as one of the earliest violent contractions towards its birth. They will live something radical that we have never dreamed but only lip sync with empty words and idle minds: Living in balance and in harmony fulfilled is the only true revolution.

Meditation opens the doorway to that future for nobody else but you.

John Hogue

(31 May 2010)

PS–In part two we will look at the next great Uranus square of 2010. It happens at the end of July. Saturn (status quo and reality checks) renews its opposition with Uranus (change and chaos) in a grand cross square with Pluto (collective transformation) in Capricorn (the establishment). It will rock your world.

Abraham sacrificing Isaac, by Rembrandt.

A great mushroom cloud ascended into Iraqi skies from a massive truck and car bombing in Baghdad on October 25. It expolded on an intersection of many key Iraqi government ministry buildings, which include the Iraqi Ministry of Justice and the headquarters of the Baghdad Provincial Council, rendering them windowless shells. Days later, the bodies are still being pulled out of the debris. At the time of this writing the death toll rises to more than 160 people, including dozens of children and over 500 are seriously wounded.

This was a direct Sunni insurgent attack on the Shia Iraqi controlled Nuri al-Maliki government. Prime Minister al-Maliki blamed it on Saddam Hussein die-hards aided and abetted by al-Qaeda trying to disrupt the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections.

I had proposed in Predictions for 2009 that progress to bring the three quarrelsome Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities that make up Iraq into a national coalition would falter by 2010. Though the dictator Saddam Hussein is dead, his evil ghost haunts Iraq’s efforts to forge a sustainable future. In death, Saddam will indeed gain more prophetic capital as Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist, as we will see below.

Ray Mabus Antichrist, Part 2

I want to share more of your comments and reflections stirred by the appointment of Ray Mabus as Secretary of the US Navy in President Obama’s cabinet. Although Mabus has the dubious coincidence, perhaps, of having a name exactly like the code name for Nostradamus’ Third and Final Antichrist, I, like a Muslim reader of my blogs named “Sultan,” tend to lean towards a candidate already dead as chief candidate hidden under Nostradamus’ anagram, see: Mabus antichrist.

Reverse the letters of Mabus and you get Subam. Reverse the b to d and you get Sudam. You can add or subtract redundant letters and get Suddam. Nostradamus’ rules of anagram allow one new letter replacement to finish the letter puzzle. Therefore, you could change the u for an a and get Saddam. However, the Arabic would allow the u to remain because the pronunciation is like a long a for awh or uh: Sawhdam or Suh-dam Hussein. Quatrain 62 of Century 2 in Nostradamus predicts the Antichrist, code named Mabus, achieves his evil destiny after death, causing a “terrible undoing of people and animals”.

At the time of this writing, the dead Saddam Hussein has fulfilled more elements of the Third Antichrist prophecies than any other living candidate. Sultan begins by reminding us to be aware of Muslim perceptions regarding the death of Saddam in this interchange below — which I will enlarge upon for the public:

SULTAN
Sudam Hussein was killed around a day or two before Eid ul Adha, I remember this because I was mad at why they did not kill him after Eid ul Adha.

HOGUE
I posted an article about that on 31 December 2006, the day after he was hung, saying it was a Shiite government’s slap in the collective Sunni faces of Sunni Iraqis. Beyond that, an indelicate gesture against the civility of all Muslims, especially because of what Eid ul Adha represents to all members of the Ummah (the community of 1 billion Muslims around the world).

SULTAN
See on Eid ul Adha Muslims sacrifice sheep to God, to commemorate how prophet Abraham was allowed to spare his son, and instead sacrifice the sheep, and I guess this is what Nostradamus saw. He probably saw Muslims sacrificing sheep or cattle and that is why he said there would be a great slaughter of animals, but I can’t explain the human part.

HOGUE
Sultan, that is a unique take on the Mabus Prophecy. I’m not sure Nostradamus meant it that way, since he was a Jew whose family became Christian just before he was born. Yet, he indeed being Jewish might use the biblical metaphor of Abraham and Isaac to date Saddam’s death on Eid ul Adha. Maybe it is one of his double entendres. He dates the death of Saddam on a festival of animal sacrifice that would lead later to the wholesale sacrifice of people if Iraq. A peaceful resolution of pent up Sunni and Shia Iraqi sectarian passions is key in preventing the war of the Third Antichrist. Were Iraq to unravel, it could take the entire Middle Eastern region down with it in a future religious civil war. Then would come the terrible destruction of people after the sacrifice of animals, if that is how to interpret the famous Mabus prophecy. Thus, the death of the dictator who suppressed these passions let the genie out of the noisome bottle.

Nostradamus was definitely aware of Islamic ideas and had some knowledge of Arabic as it appears in his prophecies. However, he did view Islam with the prejudices of 16th-century Westerners fearful of Ottoman Suleiman the Magnificent’s attempts to expand his conquests into Christendom. I do believe Ottoman encroachment colored his view of the Ummah in the future.

SULTAN
Maybe he saw a riot that broke out in Iraq, over power, I don’t know.

HOGUE

I don’t know either. I know this, I pray that Iraq will find its way, and the various brothers and sisters of different understandings of the Prophet Muhammad can live in peace there. I have hope now that there is a chance, Inch Allah (God willing).

Salaam (Peace)

John Hogue

(28 October 2009)

The date of 6 June 2008, which saw the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaoul Mofaz openly threaten Iran with war, is sandwiched between two other significant Israeli anniversaries.  June 5 was the 41st anniversary of Israel’s overwhelming surprise air strikes destroying the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan launching the Six Day War — Israel’s most sweeping victory to date, a preemptive war fought to surprise and destroy Arab invasion forces gathering on its borders. In six days, the Israeli Defense Force occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, the Jordanian West Bank territories, the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Sinai region up to the Suez Canal – including the fabled Mt. Sinai, where it is said Moses delivered Yahweh’s Ten Commandments to His Chosen People, the Hebrews.

The day after 6 June 2008 marks the 27-year anniversary of Israeli jet bombers obliterating Osirak, the name of a French-built nuclear test reactor built outside of Baghdad, on 7 June 1981 before it came online. Saddam Hussein had intended it to provide enough uranium to build twelve atomic bombs to use on Israel.

Few in the Middle East would overlook the symbolic timing. Shaoul Mofaz made his formal speech on a Friday, the Islamic Sabbath. Some might also recall the date as the anniversary of the Allied beach landings on   Normandy — D-Day, “decision” day — 64 years before.

The Israeli Cabinet certainly had decided something Friday, 6 June 2008, and what Mofaz said made oil prices make an unheard of jump of 11 dollars in a single day to sit at just under $140 a barrel. The US Stock Exchange plummeted nearly 400 points.

“Other options [other than war] are disappearing,” explained Mofaz. “The sanctions are not effective. There will be no alternative but to attack Iran in order to stop the Iranian nuclear program.”

A year ago (June 2007), I made the following prediction on page 112 of my digital book Nostradamus the War with Iran (click on  Nostradamus Iran) based on my study of the 16th-century French prophet. I wrote the following prophecy in a satirical tone playing holy Neo-Con roller and morale booster to those Neo-Conservative hawks disappointed with the less-than-satisfactory performance of their man in the White House, G.W. Bush, concerning their plans to democratize Iran by conquest and preemptive military action while time for their hold on the White House was running out. A Neo-Con plan, I might add, that has been in the works since they published their first manifesto in 1992, with the current Vice President and number one war hawk, Dick Cheney’s editorial help. The brackets are inserted for clarity:

We [Neo-Cons] have the faith in our plans, that even adversity cannot stop us from punishing Iran…

Fear not!

God bless Israel!

She will [attack Iran] if we at first cannot. Israel upon the wings of her heroic airmen will strike down Iran’s nuclear installations at Arak, Natanz and Esfahan. Our President [Bush] will make Americans come to their aid when Iran counterattacks and there will be nary a Democrat in Congress who will dare public scandal and bear the label “anti-Semite” by voting not to aid Israel in her greatest hour of need.

In January 2008, I posted the following prediction on page 52 of my digital book Predictions for 2008:

Israel will attack Iran in spring of 2008 at the earliest. Perhaps around Shavuot, a Hebrew celebration held in late May to early June each year. It marks the time after the Hebrews were liberated from Pharaoh when Moses gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai and they dedicated themselves as a nation committed to serving Yehovah, their God. In the history of the modern Jewish State, military strikes on perceived enemies of Israel have often happened on or around Shavuot, 50 days after Passover.

…The chess table is set. If Israel strikes Iran in 2008, America will be forced – accidentally on purpose – into the war. Unless the Iranians play possum and don’t counterattack Israel with their missiles. Overnight this crisis changes the gestalt of the US presidential campaigns.

…The next president will adopt Bush’s wars. They will become Hillary’s wars…Obama’s Wars…

There will be more US forces in the Middle East, South and Southwest Asia in the next president’s term than during the Bush era.

On this current celebration of Shavuot, it would seem the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister is adding an eleventh commandment to the ten brought down by Moses from Sinai:

Thou shall not make atomic weapons unless thou art an Israeli

It is the biggest open secret in the Middle East that Israel possesses between 200 to 500 nuclear weapons. In part, the arms race Israel dreads is a red dragon from the East, from Iran, she has in part conceived by being the first Middle Eastern nation to burden and threaten the region with nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The karma of making dreadful weapons first, brings the karma of a dreadful arms race. In a way, Israel has created the monster nuclear program she now threatens to destroy in Iran, because it has an overwhelming arsenal and there are no deterrents. Her enemies must go nuclear to bring balance to a deadly thing the descendants of the Hebrews have brought into the Holy Land.

John Hogue
(16 June 2008)

Days after Cheney’s departure, the high Saudi Shura council had discussed plans for initiating national radiation emergency drills.

In the first week of April, the Israeli Defense Forces initiated a countrywide, five-day home front civil defense exercise against hypothetical conventional, chemical and biological missile attacks from Iran and Iran-backed Hezbullah in Southern Lebanon. A review of the exercise by the IDF concluded that Israeli citizens were less prepared for a missile war than during the Hezbullah missile barrage of the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon War.

On 5 April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flew nearly halfway across the world from Washington to Muscat, Oman, for a few hours of secret talks with the Sultan of Oman, then climbed right back on his jet for Washington. There has been little US military presence and never a high priority visit entertained by any Bush cabinet member to the Sheikdom that encompasses most of the southern coast of the Strait of Hormuz. Why now? Gates told reporters traveling with him that Sultan Qaboos is the “ruler of this key Gulf state which faces Iran across the strategic Strait of Hormuz. They provide a lot of support for the United States. The sultan is a good friend. I just think it’s important to touch base.”

The following day (6 April), Lebanon, Syria and Iran went on high military alert. Debka.com (sometimes a good source of Israeli military intelligence albeit ever laced with a mixed bag of Israeli psyops propaganda) was one of the first reporting what later international press confirmed. The USS Abraham Lincoln (carrier) Strike Force was heading for station on the Persian Gulf. That would, by end of April, reinforce the US Fifth Fleet operations in the Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Arabian Sea with THREE Carrier Strike Groups. Those of you who have read my book anticipating these events — click on Nostradamus Iran — know that this is the minimum number needed for an all-out air strike on Iran.

After VP Cheney and Sec. of Defense Gates came home, the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus came home to Washington DC with US Ambassador Ryan Crocker to give their much anticipated progress report before Congress (8 April) about the ongoing military surge in Iraq. Petraeus under congressional oath declared that Iran is waging a proxy war on US forces in Iraq. Iran was the most memorable part of their report, citing the daily barrage of rockets and mortars hitting the US Embassy in Green Zone in Baghdad were made in Iran. Iranian weapons and roadside bombs have killed hundreds of US troops over the years of US occupation. Petraeus stressed weapons and training of Shia guerillas come from operatives of the Iranian al-Quds Revolutionary Guards based across the Iraqi border in Iran. He and Crocker made it sound like Iran’s involvement was the last serious impediment to US success in Iraq. Were they putting before congress an argument for “just cause” for punitive military response?

In the subsequent weeks of April into early May saber rattling was all a clatter in the Middle East. Iran blocked the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) from snooping deeper into their nuclear program while Iranian President Ahmadinejad made a big show of inspecting the 10,000 new centrifuges coming online to make nuclear fuel for his reactors. The Iranian Secretary of Defense always at his shoulder. US and Israeli intelligence did not fail to notice this was a provocation that civilian uranium fuel could be used for military purposes. Next, US navy personnel aboard one of the many civilian cargo container ships contracted by the Pentagon fired warning shots on approaching gunboats on more than one occasion in the crowded shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz. Whether these patrol boats were Iranian was not confirmed. It is important to note that the US military has always hired a large number of civilian cargo vessels to ship in fuel and materials before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

On 30 April, the Abraham Lincoln joined the Harry S. Truman in the Persian Gulf for a big show of force. The Truman sailed out of the Persian Gulf shortly after, but not for home. Not just yet. The Truman Carrier Strike Group is now in the Eastern Mediterranean, since 6 May, supporting US Sixth Fleet’s strategic priority to, as Navy jargon states, “Improve maritime security and safety in the region.” In other words, to beef up Sixth Fleet’s military might stationed a few miles off the coast of Lebanon, where Iran’s other proxy, Hezbullah, began the first bloody salvoes in what seems to be an Iranian sanctioned attempt to overthrow the US-friendly Lebanese government.

For the last year I have been writing bulletins about the malefic aspect of Mars transiting over the sun signs of President Bush and the United States as a time when rash and precipitous decisions lead to US military disasters. I said decisions for war by this president would be made from 5 March to 9 May during the Mars in Cancer transit. Philip Giraldi on the final day of that Mars transit posted on the American Conservative blog page something that my own sources confirmed. He wrote, “There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Quds-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants.”

Last week, the US government passed stark warnings to Iran that it should publicly admit to interfering with Iraq’s recovery and that it will desist from further arming and abetting radical Shia elements there. Iran immediately countered saying the US should stop arming and abetting ethnic guerrilla insurgencies in Iran. Terrorist bombings in mosques in southeastern Iran killed dozens and wounded hundreds in late April. The last several weeks has seen a rise in hostilities in Iraq climaxing with battles raging in Basra and Sadr City, a slum of Baghdad of two million Shias and haven for the Iranian armed Mahdi Army militia of Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Time has run out. This is the final window for Bush and his ideologues to do it. Cry, “Havoc!” and let slip the Neo-Cons of war on Iran. It would seem that the next step taking place any time this May into June will see unfold some or all the following possible scenarios:

The US president, his own afflicted birth chart made more delusional by the influence of Mars in Cancer, thinks a dramatic cruise missile attack on one or a number of al-Quds bases ringing Teheran will be the quick and easy military gesture that will back Iran out of Iraq and out of support of Hezbullah in Lebanon. Of course, it could lead to more weapons and training funneled into Iraq, and a full-scale attempt by Hezbullah to overthrow the Lebanese government by force. Israel then enters the conflict. The US occupation forces in Iraq would have two thirds of the population being sympathetic to Iran turning against them with renewed widespread fighting. A kiss of death for all the surge has accomplished.

If Iran does not back down and remains more belligerent and Iranian-made rockets from Lebanon once again begin falling down on Israel, the Jewish nation might act decisively. All those civil defense drills practiced and those planned in Saudi Arabian territories after the White House’s chief apostle for war with Iran — Vice President Cheney — departed, might come in handy if Israel should lay waste the nuclear reactors of Iran.

John Hogue
(15 May 2008)

What can prophecy and Nostradamus counter?

December 2003:
To Catch an Antichrist

Answering for Saddam’s prophetic significance caught and dead requires we first address a third element. What did Saddam’s capture and fall from power do to his stature as one of the top candidates for Nostradamus’ most talked about prophetic topic these days–who is the man code named “Mabus,” his “Third Antichrist?” People asked me in essence the following question in emails by the burnt server full starting the month of his capture, December 2003:

Does Saddam Hussein’s capture take him out of the running for Nostradamus’ “Mabus”?

This is what I said back then three years and three months ago. The brackets are mine from today for clarification:

In my opinion, it has put him back in the running. The American occupying forces might rue the day Saddam Hussein did not fight and die like his two sons, when cornered. If Saddam Hussein faces a very public trial the Americans will need to find some way to save themselves from being viewed and accomplices in many of his crimes against humanity in the 1980s. Saddam on the witness stand could talk about the years the US provided him with the satellite targeting intelligence and the materials to make his weapons of mass destruction. The same weapons that gassed five thousand civilian Kurds “and” hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers during the Iraq-Iran War. He could implicate [the twice serving former US Secretary of State for the Ford and G.W. Bush administrations], Donald Rumsfeld, and many others in the current Bush administration who had a hands-on relationship with supporting the Iraqi dictator in the past as their surrogate foe against the Ayatollahs of Iran. Saddam could weave lies with truth and successfully propagate the illusion that he is a martyred hero of the downtrodden Arabs and stir radical elements across the Islamic world. Finally, Saddam might face a public execution that could make his name a rallying cry of Islamic fundamentalists for the coming 27 years of terrorism. Thus as quatrain 62 of Century 2 in Nostradamus’ prophecies states: “Mabus [Saddam] soon dies” and he becomes the rallying cry for “a terrible destruction of people and animals.” Or, as Quatrain 77 of Century 8 adds, “The third Antichrist is very soon annihilated.” The Arab/Islamic world could remember Saddam’s trial as a farce of western Crusaders and their puppet Iraqi government. His public execution becomes martyrdom. Moreover, his martyrdom triggers the war of the Third Antichrist: “Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last…”

There are other scenarios, of course–other candidates who may fall early in their war, such as President Bush or Usama bin Laden and trigger a generation of new fighters and conflict. We shall have to see. If American leaders wish to avoid a scandal of historic proportions, they should block public access to the courtroom and keep Saddam Hussein sedated and mentally compromised throughout the coming trial.

SEEK THE REAL HARMONIC CONCORDANCE
(31 December 2003)

ASSESSMENT (April 2007):
Saddam Hussein’s trial began 19 October 2005 before a Special Tribunal trained by US legal mentors and guarded within the US Green Zone in Baghdad by US soldiers. It was televised, until shameful and sometimes macabre court antics and shout matches between the judges and Saddam saw the live feed cut. There was no focus on US involvement in Saddam’s dictatorship. Either by intent or coincidence, the crux of this trial settled on allegations that Hussein and seven other defendants committed crimes against humanity with regard to events that took place after a failed assassination attempt in Dujail in 1982 by members of the Islamic Dawa Party. One could wonder why there was no public trial about Saddam gassing Kurds. Could it be that the Iraqi court’s US handlers might be embarrassed by Saddam’s defense lawyers presenting evidence of US culpability in exporting the materials and technical knowledge to build chemical weapons of mass destruction? Would the former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld be called as a witness to explain just what he said as an envoy of the US to Saddam in the early 1980s? Did Rumsfeld and the Reagan Administration give Hussein the means to gas people?

There is now a notorious picture floating around the internet of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on 19 December 1983. Rumsfeld was then a first time around former Secretary of Defense for the Ford Administration. He went to Baghdad as a special envoy of President Reagan. Rumsfeld visited again on 24 March 1984. On that same day, the UN released its report that Iraq had used mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against Iranian troops. The New York Times reported from Baghdad on 29 March 1984, “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with Iraq and the U.S., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name.”

Ten months after the first and publicly televised trial of Saddam Hussein began, another was convened trying him and six co-defendants in abstentia for genocide during the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds of Northern Iraq. No TV show trial, that, with the focus of media attention trained on Saddam’s soap opera of a legal proceeding elsewhere. Indeed, within four months the Kurdish trial and those planned for other crimes against humanity committed by Saddam were discontinued after a rush to render death by hanging for the Dujail massacre proceeded on 30 December 2006. The preliminary stages of execution were filmed by the US backed and financed Al Hurra TV station. Nothing more broadcast about this execution was planned. But soon a home movie of the whole execution would help give birth to Saddam’s new image as a dead martyr sacrificed by Shia thugs in the minds of many Sunni Iraqi nationalists and Arab Sunnis across the region.

A public execution did happen, as I predicted back on 31 December 2003, the most public of them all. A cell phone secretly filmed the sordid affair soon to be posted across the world on YouTube. The whole world watched, and still “can” watch the execution of Saddam in a video phone’s stuttering shutter tangle of glaring light and shifting shadows of hooded men, lurching in and out of an unsteady hand’s broadcast from somewhere in the shadows back against the wall of the dank, moldy smelling execution chamber. It is said the President Bush upon viewing the cell phone hanging shook his head in disgust for the way the al-Maliki government made Saddam Hussein’s execution appear like a lynching, a revenge killing.

The “Black One” did make the “Angry One” Saddam repent in his last moments, or, at least tried.

The cell phone movie recorded (black hooded Shia guards) mocking Saddam standing on the trap door moments before his hanging with an obscenely huge noose knot chaffing the left side of his neck and face. They chanted the name of “Muqtada” three times, rapidly. Sort of sounded like the Saturday Night Live deli chef yelling, “Cheeseburger-cheeseburger-cheeseburger…!”

Saddam Hussein sneered a cynical smile and asked in Arabic, “Is this how you show your Arab manhood?”

The statement cuts more than a Westerner would know. He implied that no manly Arab would praise a puppet thrall of the non-Arab Iranians, like al-Sadr. Saddam at death’s threshold lived up to his name to the last (Saddam in Arabic means “the one who confronts”). He was making a pro-Sunni Arab statement in final defiance of a government and justice system he had continually raged against and denounced during his trial as a pawn of the US and the Iranians.

The al-Maliki government stepped clumsily into their roles as Saddam Hussein had wished: as murderers of a great Sunni Arab leader. Shi’ites were the only ones physically present witnessing the killing. No Kurds or Sunnis need apply. They were excluded. The rush to hang Saddam for a Shia-only atrocity excluded forever public trials forcing Saddam to face his Sunni and Kurd victims, which were minion. Adding insult to religious blasphemy, the Shia government made a point to display extreme disrespect to every majority Sunni Muslim in the Middle East and the world. They killed a prominent Sunni Dictator–a figurehead in Sunni culture who, for better or worse, is thought of as a father of a nation–at dawn prayers on their scheduled day for beginning the holy celebration of Eid al-Adha. This is the festival of forgiveness and victory in faith marking the end of the Hajj pilgrimage. Shia’s celebrate Eid al-Adha a day later.

At the time of final edits for this article (12 April 2007), Saddam Hussein’s body is enshrined alongside his sons near Tikrit in Awja, the village of his birth in Anbhar Province, Iraq. The pilgrimage of vengeful Sunnis has begun.

Gazan al-Jabouri for Reuters reported the day after his hanging (31 December 2006) that, “In an outpouring of grief and anger from Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs at the Shi’ite-led government that rushed through the execution, mourners knelt and prayed by his tomb over which the Iraqi flag had been draped…”

A person in the crowd from Mosul decried, “The Persians have killed him. I can’t believe it. By God, we will take revenge.”

A Sunni Iraqi calling Arab Shias “Persians” is a racial slur tying the Iraqi majority and the al-Maliki government responsible for Saddam’s hanging together as lackeys of the non-Arab Persian-speaking Shia Iranians. What al-Jabouri overlooks is the general opinion held by the sizeable Sunni minority that the Iranians prop as puppets the al-Maliki government. There can be no peace or community shared under an Iranian controlled “democracy.”

Another mourner passing before the tomb of Saddam and his sons was heard to say, “All we can do now is take it out against the Americans and the government.”

Symbolic funerals were held all across Sunni quarters of Iraq wherein many swore revenge. Since that time the Sunni insurrection continues to gain violent momentum. The Shia controlled Iraqi government has made a monster into a mentor for freedom, a hellion into a hero for future generations of Sunni Arab resistance to all things Shi’ite.

Before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein made a prediction:

“When I die, so dies Iraq!”

Will a tyrant in the end become a prophet? In Part 5, we journey through prophecies of national implosion and sectarian civil war.

John Hogue
(16 April 2007)

Sa main derniere par Alus sanguinaire
Ne se pourra par la mer guarentir:
Entre deux fleuues craindre main militaire,
Le noir l’ireux le sera repentir.

His hand [that is, his power] finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

Nostradamus (1556) 6 Q33

The man between “two rivers” is the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein hemmed in between the Tigris and the Euphrates in Iraq. The phrase entre deux fleuues says as much. It hints to the name Mesopotamia (Iraq). The phrase “between two rivers” alludes to the Greek mesos (middle or between) potamos (river). Why him rather than some other fellow? Because Saddam Hussein is the only Mesopotamian leader in history who had needed to fear a military hand coming from the sea, the Persian Gulf. That military hand belongs to a creature Nostradamus cryptically calls “bloody Alus.” People have been wrestling to find deep and abstract meaning behind this enigma since 1556. A simple solution might have been overlooked. A Frenchman trying to describe a future acronym of a country, not as his future countrymen would call it but the way its own citizens would proclaim it. Hence, the “l” becomes the abbreviated French le (the); in this way, “a-l-u-s” becomes an anagram for “l’USA” (the USA). Nostradamus qualifies it as sanguinaire (bloody).

Saddam Hussein was powerless to prevent an attack from the sea. It came through cruise missiles and carrier strike forces in both the Gulf War (1991) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003). It must be remembered that in the first war Saddam Hussein was so concerned about his coastal flank in Kuwait that he moved a number of divisions along the sea beaches to defend against signs of a gathering US amphibious invasion. It was never more than a ruse schemed up by the commander of allied forces, General H Norman Schwarzkopf, to pull Iraqi troops off their positions along manmade sand berms on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border from where the actual landward attack would come.

Later Nostradamus’ bloody USA launched a second ground invasion force shipped into the Gulf and based in Kuwait in 2003, covered by two Carrier Strike Groups. The armored military hand or power to be feared lets fly two lightning fast armored pincers of US Army and Marine units bearing down on Baghdad alongside the Tigris and Euphrates. They rapidly took out the Baathist regime in six weeks. Saddam Hussein, their dictator, is that Angry One, displayed before the world, standing in the dock under guard, huffing and puffing in frequent and public rages before a revolving relay of new judges at his criminal trial.

He was a Sunni Muslim prisoner hemmed in by police guards devoted to what Nostradamus called the Black One. That dark Ayatollah would make Saddam Hussein repent. I predict he will make all Sunnis in Iraq repent because through the Bloody USA this black and Saturnian young cleric and rabble-rouser’s hand had been set free. The USA destroyed the dictatorship that repressed it. It is mostly his people, the Shia majority population in Iraq, that in the first days of “freedom” by a US gun gathered in mobs aided by US Abrams tanks and cranes that battered down the idols of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime which had harmed them the most. The USA had un-gagged and liberated the black robed, dark eyed Ayatollah Muqtada al-Sadr to preach the imminent return of the Mahdi. He, who is the twelfth and final Imam of Islamic apocalyptic prophecy. He, who will lead cleric  Muqtada’s “Mahdi Militia” on a march to Jerusalem and herald Judgment Day for all Muslim apostates (the Sunnis), Jews and the Christian “Crusaders” who now occupy Iraq. It was not the USA’s intent to give cleric Muqtada the right to form a 10,000-man militia and set up the holy bully pulpit of the loudest voice of Islamic eschatology in Iraq. Neither did the USA want future history, as seen by Nostradamus, to mark and qualify that nation for posterity with the future’s blood-soaked brush. Yet, here we are, in that future.

The USA has left a long and bloodstained legacy in “Mesopotamia” (Iraq) starting with aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein’s tyranny over his own people and neighbors in the region during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The Iraqi invasion pushed back across the border in the first year of the eight-year conflict settled into a gruesome stalemate of trench warfare along a defense line drawn through marshland and deserts across the heartland of Mesopotamia (the Basra region). Starting around 1983, the US satellite intelligence cameras exposed the buildup of each new Iranian human wave offensive. American spies secretly beamed that intelligence to Saddam Hussein and shipped materials and know how to Iraqi weapons manufacturers so they could make chemical weapons that gassed waves of charging Iranian soldiers by the hundreds of thousands. By war’s inconclusive end, southern Mesopotamia was a desolate graveyard for nearly a million Iranians and Iraqis.

Next came the Gulf War in 1991. Estimates calculate between 30,000 to 150,000 Iraqi’s died in the US led coalition air attacks across  Kuwait and Iraq. Another half-million children in the next decade would die from water born diseases because of US-Coalition bomb damage to Mesopotamia’s water purifying systems.

The next ensanguined episode came shortly after the Gulf War ended. President George H. W. Bush in an unconsciously off-handed public statement, inspired a Shia and Kurdish insurrection against Saddam Hussein. They had believed Bush Sr. promised US support if they would only rise up. They did. No US support came and Saddam’s surviving armies crushed the rebellion with over 350,000 Kurds and Shias butchered.

We catch up now to the most recent bleeding USA adventure in Mesopotamia. It is estimated that Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and subsequent years of insurrection and the sectarian violence it unleashed has been responsible for the deaths of upwards to 600,000 Iraqis.

The butcher’s bill for Alus Sanguinaire so far is around 1.6 million Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds and Iranians.

All of this mess and mayhem the “bloody” bungling “Alus” has hatched out on Iraq in the name of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and now a non-existent stable democracy. It has empowered all Black Ones of radical Shia cloth. The Ayatollahs of Iran and Iraq now have, thanks to the USA’s “bloody” experiment in Iraqi democracy political power and influence. Firebrands like cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have won seats in the Iraqi Parliament to foment and establish what will soon become an anti-USA pro-radical Islamic, Iranian-style theocracy out of what is left of Iraq.

Back exactly three years ago in April 2004, I foresaw Muqtada al-Sadr as the Black One of the Nostradamus prophecy. I saw him make his first play of hand through to power and significance graced by strategic missteps of Alus Sanguinaire’s delusional will:

Is the dark eyed and black bearded rabble-rouser, Muqtada al-Sadr, Nostradamus’ “black one”?

During the Saddam Hussein dictatorship his much revered father, the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr oversaw the al-Hawza (the main school of Shia instruction) in Najaf. He became so popular that Saddam Hussein had him assassinated in 1999. After the fall of Saddam, al-Sadr the son attempted to take his father’s place leading the al-Hawza in Najaf. He did so with an added malevolence his father may have never condoned. The al-Jazeera web site states:

“His followers surrounded the home of Grand Ayatollah Allah Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian citizen, asking him to leave the country soon after occupation. This followed the murder of the prominent Shia cleric Abd al-Majid al-Khoei who had returned to Iraq with US forces after years in exile returned to Iraq.”

Al-Sadr the son has neither his father’s theological knowledge or authority, though his passionate oratory has inspired the younger and unemployed followers of his father, many of whom joined the younger al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi militia. Al-Sadr’s newspaper, al-Hawza, made it abundantly clear that he rejected the US occupation and their idea of a provisional Iraqi governing council. He did foment passionate yet non-violent resistance to the US occupation until US authorities shut down al-Hawza the end of March 2004, alleging it was inciting violence. Mass demonstrations of al-Sadr’s followers ensued until 5 April 2004–the day he concluded that non-violent protest was useless and urged his followers and militia to “terrorize their enemies.”

There is a clear and present danger this rebellion will spread beyond al-Sadr’s small movement and ignite an insurrection across two thirds of Iraq, among the Iraqi Shias. And yet, it may well turn out that the al-Sadr rebellion in itself will be impotent unless the US forces gathering their tanks around Najaf should use heavy handed tactics to seize al-Sadr hiding inside the holy city of all Shia factions. Even if the US occupiers show restraint in the 11th hour, there may yet be a terrible rebellion brewing, beyond their worst nightmares. It could come from a command or a statement of displeasure from Sistani if he thinks the US forces aren’t pulling out of Iraq fast enough after 30 June [2004].

BLACK SHADOW OVER IRAQ
(22 April 2004)

ASSESSMENT (April 2007):
April 2004 remains so far the second most lethal month of the Iraq occupation for US-Coalition with 140 dead, 1,214 wounded. Most fell in the first battle of Fallujah and street skirmishes against al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia in Najaf. The US Viceroy Paul Bremer’s negotiations with the peaceful and influential Ayatollah Ali Sistani helped cool the hotheaded al-Sadr down and forestalled a wider insurrection. The forces of “Bloody Alus” a few days before 30 June 2004 began their Texas two-step dance to Iraqi democracy handing over sovereignty to an interim government by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Next, the US guns guarded Iraqi polling places in a national election on 30 January 2005. Eight million people voted for a Transitional National Assembly. The Shia United Alliance won a majority of the assembly seats, the Kurd parties second. The rare Sunni candidates dodging car bombings and abduction came in a distant last place. A third of Iraq’s population had mostly boycotted the elections out of fear of reprisal or out of open hatred of the political scheme imposed by US occupiers stripping Sunni Iraqis of their centuries-long political overlording of Iraq.

The second national election was held on 15 December 2005 for the first full-term government and parliament in the post-Saddam “democratic” era. The Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance once again emerged the winner of the most parliamentary seats, however they did not win an absolute majority to the unforeseen profit of  Muqtada al-Sadr. He ran for office and at present holds an influential swing block of 30 seats. Without al-Sadr’s representatives, there would be no Shia dominated coalition government. He has become prime minister maker or breaker. Although he publicly puts up a front as an Iraqi nationalist, he is not adverse to taking money, training and imported arms for his Mahdi militiamen from Ayatollahs across the border in Iran. He is their political pit bull in Iraq–Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda bombers, Kurdish Peshmerga militias and US Crusaders, be warned. An all-out fight with him is a surrogate war with Iran.

The onset of the US “surge” of troops in early 2007 initially warranted al-Sadir become a guest of those Ayatollahs in Iran. His militiamen patiently waited for the US to tire of their planned “surge” of extra troops into Baghdad to give the government and the society time to civilize. They knew this was a respite. The first hints of an escalation are with us now. Just this Monday, 09 April 2007, the New York Times reported that “tens of thousands of protesters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr … took to the streets of the holy city of Najaf on Monday in an extraordinarily disciplined rally to demand an end to the American military presence in Iraq, burning American flags and chanting ‘Death to America!’”

Muqtada al-Sadr is back from Iran. Great throngs in what was the largest demonstration since 2003, pressed through the streets waving a sea of fluttering Iraqi flags, rather than the black with green Shia banners of previous assemblies. It is presumed that Muqtada al-Sadr on this the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad desired to promote his pretense of being an Iraqi nationalist rebel, rather than a Shi’ite sectarian bully. A small band of Sunnis came along for the Shia “tide” and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers in uniform marched hand in hand with Mahdi militia waving the Iraqi flag. It was definitely a panoramic display of “Yankee infidel go home.” Only supporters of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, still the most powerful cleric in Iraq, can produce such large-scale demonstrations. The concern I mentioned back in April 2004 about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani growing impatient with US forces leaving Iraq was unfounded. Often the empirical fulfillment of prophecies take a longer time than subjectively forecasted. What I said nearly three years ago in early April 2004 could stand as a prediction written for the near future beyond April 2007: a Shia insurrection in Iraq that plays like a domino effect spreading radical Islamic insurrections across the region.

The 09 April demonstrations flagellated the shoulder of Shia clerical hierarchy in Iraq with the stinging reality that Muqtada al-Sadr is a force to be reckoned with. I wonder if in the future, even Sistani must bow to the deep fires and defiance of al-Sadr’s ever more popular movement.

It is a thought that occurred to me long ago. Returning to the passage written for “Black Shadow Over Iraq” (22 April 2004), I explained how an interpretation of who is “bloody Alus” could expand to embrace more than the USA, more than one Ayatollah. Such is the nebulous labyrinth of Nostradamian possibility–from bloody Alus (L’USA) to a bloody (ALI S)istani, a revolution of Islam born in Iran might spread westward across the Middle East:

[Ayatollah] Khomeini’s revolution is still alive and waiting.

It could topple a new [Iraqi] government and break up post-Saddam Iraq, and it could happen and very soon.

An Islamic fundamentalist party rules Turkey at this moment. For now they pledge to respect and uphold the secular Turkish constitution. What will happen in Turkey if Iraq falls into chaos, the Iraqi Kurds declare their independence, and the eastern third of Turkey, populated by Kurds fights to secede from Turkey?

What of Egypt? At this moment the ailing president, Mubarak, has long and brutally suppressed a volcano of Islamic militancy in Egypt. What happens if Iraq falls into chaos, and Mubarak should pass away? A Shia rebellion against Western occupation in Iraq might galvanize Egyptians to overthrow the pro-Western government of Mubarak, or his successor …

Let us again examine the riddles of “bloody Alus” and the “back one” framed in the light of volatile events in early 2004:

His power finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

…The line, “his power finally through bloody Alus,” could point to the power a black robed Ayatollah extremist has rekindled to incite a Shiite rebellion against a draconian occupying force Nostradamus calls “bloody Alus.” A rudimentary use of the laws of anagram easily transforms the riddle “Alus” into “l’usa” (or, “the USA” in English)!

One can also drop the “u” in “Alus” and replace it with an “i” to imply (Ali S)istani. In that case “his power” stands for al-Sadr’s “power” to incite rebellion beyond his own small movement infecting Sistani’s followers “through” a union with the “bloody Ali” Sistani. Taking this farther, perhaps Nostradamus qualifies “Alus” as “bloody” because he saw visions of Shia men in these parades of devotion ritually slicing their foreheads and thus bathing their heads and shoulders in blood; or, he saw them flogging their backs to a “bloody” mess while they celebrated the martyrdom of their founder, Ali (“Alus”).

… Given Nostradamus’ predilection to hide multiple meanings in his quatrains, one might also add that the forces of the bloody “l’USA-Alus” occupation will find their supply lines to the Persian Gulf cut in a future rebellion. If all southern Iraq rose in rebellion the US convoys strung along hundreds of miles of lonely roads would be under constant attack from Baghdad all the way to the port of Um Qasir. (“He will not be able to protect himself from the sea.”)

Line three describes the “two rivers” of Iraq–the Tigris and Euphrates. This line first applied itself in earlier interpretations to the “fear” Saddam Hussein felt when pitted against US forces in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003. A deeper layer of prescient meaning might denote an Ayatollah leading a future rebellion of Shiites in a far more heavy-handed battle to come in the streets of cities across southern Iraq…

The “black one” should fear the military hand of the Bush administration. Iraq will suffer a bloodbath–one that line four implies. One that even a “black” robed Ayatollah as moderate as Grand Ayatollah Sistani might unleash if he challenges the “angry one”–a frustrated President Bush–to “repent” his escalating military violence by ordering a general strike and rebellion of 15 million Iraqi Shias.

BLACK SHADOW OVER IRAQ
(22 April 2004)

Let us leave sleeping insurgencies of Black Shia Ayatollahs lie for now. In a few days I will post a review of prophecies about the fate of the Angry One the US and Ayatollahs deposed. We will then plumb the future importance of Saddam Hussein’s capture and execution  as a fait a compli for the death of an idea called “Iraq.”

John Hogue
(14 April 2007)

Two days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on America… the US president, indelicately defined his war against Islamist terrorism as “a great 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 & secte crucigere,
Se dressera en Mesopotamie:
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.

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 [rather than the previous and temporary invasion of parts of Iraq during the offensive to liberate Kuwait in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm]. 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.

… 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 personnel 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.

NEW CRUSADES AND QUAGMIRES
(11 July 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
This all might sound familiar, even a common place litany of developments and troubles for the US occupation, only I set this down over three years and eight months ago. There was then no Iraqi government in place but what I would ostensibly call a US Viceroy, Paul Brenner, whom the president called his special envoy and chief US administrator of Iraq. Brenner would appoint an Interim Iraqi Governing Council after the invasion. They in turn under US official observation dissolved on 1 June 2004 before picking Allad Alawi as the prime minister of an interim government preparing the way for the first national elections in 2005. America’s Iraqi Prime Minister ended his term on April 7, 2005, after a national election reshuffled the interim national assembly with a face less friendly to Americans. The leader of the Islamic Dawa Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, an Ayatollah no less, who chose to wear a western suit rather than the black robe and turban. Bush’s new “reason” for occupying Iraq was on the march and a democratic majority was thronging south, ever closer to Iran and its ruling council of radical Ayatollahs of the Shia sect of Islam. The second national election brought Nouri al-Maliki and a coalition of Shia, and Shia-theocratic factions together to rule Iraq, to the horror and general boycott of Sunnis and the concern of more tolerant yet cautious Kurds who would deal with a Shia government if they supported Kurdish ambitions for autonomy within their lands in Northern Iraq.

Back when I wrote “New Crusades and Quagmires” there was no appearance yet of powerful Shia Ayatollahs, such as al-Hakim, or Shia cleric  Muqtada al-Sadr holding political sway over the government. There were no black-cloaked militias of al-Hakim’s Badr Brigades or al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army tyrannizing the streets, forcing women to cover up. There was no shadow of theocracy or the enforcement of a radical fundamentalist interpretation of the Sharia law in the provinces they ruled by majority, taking what was the most secular of Arab countries back into a medieval dogma. I presented the scenario above when there was no sign for years to come of President Bush’s escalation, his “surge.” Saddam Hussein was still at large for another five months. He would not be hung for another three years.

I implied for the first time on 11 July 2003 that the Sharia law, would hold and they would win the war–not the crusaders who gave them the freedom to rule. Right now the Sharia is holding.

When I wrote the quoted passage above, the mainstream press, US president and vice president viewed the guerilla insurrection as a small affair of malcontented Baathists and dead enders from Saddam Hussein’s shattered dictatorship. They became for the first time the dismissive object of Dick Cheney’s serene and confident, basso-profundo pontifications: they were a pitiful little band of rebels belonging to an insurrection in its “death throes.”

No Dick! The insurrection has grown since July 2003, long after Saddam’s capture in December 2003. It has radicalized Iraq.

2003–2004:
The Arab Prince and the Black One who will make him repen

On 01 August 2003, about three weeks after posting prophecies about Mesopotamia and Crusaders in “New Crusades and Quagmires”, it seemed time for my oracle to train its inner eye on unraveling the mystery behind Nostradamus’ cryptic prophecy about an Arab prince who could become Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist. A dark younger rival aided by a thing called “bloody Alus” will undo him. When I wrote the following, Saddam was a deposed dictator, a hunted man in a US occupied Iraq and his possible successors, his sons Uday and Qusay, had both been killed in a firefight with US soldiers. The brackets are mine from March 2007:

Saddam Hussein’s rapid fall might indicate he is out of the running [for Nostradamus' Mabus-Third Antichrist prophecy]. However, at the date of this writing, he is still alive, and now overseeing a part, if not the leader of, a gathering guerrilla insurrection in Iraq. Death in the near future may yet see him fulfill the criterion for Mabus in Century 2, Quatrain 62: he soon dies at the onset of the war and his death is a catalyst for the great destruction of people and animals around the world in a 27-year war of international terrorism.

I wish to quote my 1997 interpretation of Century 6 Quatrain 33 for today’s theme about the aftermath of the Saddam regime.

Sa main derniere par Alus sanguinaire
Ne se pourra par la mer guarentir:
Entre deux fleuues craindre main militaire,
Le noir l’ireux le fera repentir.

His power finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

The quatrain implies that Saddam Hussein (“the angry one”) is the man who is “unable to protect himself by sea” (his defenses proved useless against sea-launched cruise missiles both during and after the Gulf War of 1991). Saddam, the Mesopotamian leader “between two rivers” (the Tigris and Euphrates) who fears the “military hand” of the West, may also need to fear the hand or power of bloody “Alus,” the “black one,” who is someone other than Abu Nidal. He could be a future black-robed Ayatollah from Iran.

END OF EXCERPT

I would add that the Ayatollah I spoke of six years earlier might turn out to be the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei or the leader of Iraqi Shiite Ayatollahs fomenting a fundamentalist Islamic state in Post-Saddam Iraq.

WHO IS NOSTRADAMUS’ THIRD ANTICHRIST?
(01 August 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
It is nearly ten years after 1997 and three years and seven months on from posting my assessment in August 2003 about a rising tide of Shia radicalism overtaking Iraq. Ayatollah Khamenei, the true leader behind the Iranian presidential puppet, Ahmadinejad, pulls the purse strings and his al-Kuds revolutionary guards train and arm the Iraqi Shia militias. At this moment Muqtada al-Sadr tarries in Iran seeking protection from the US troop surge until it spends itself and he can return to lead his militias in Baghdad and Najaf. (Update: 5 April 2007: rumor has it he has already returned to Najaf this week.)

The next passage written in August 2003 reads like a history of what has happened up to the present, even though at the time it was only a prediction:

Saddam’s sons have been killed. He will follow them shortly. What transpires in the months or a year ahead is a new insurrection fomented by a black robed and angry Iraqi Shiite Ayatollah. Whether his anger or US imperialist interests in Iraq are justified only history will tell. Prophecy tells us that a new guerrilla war is coming. It may not be solely a war waged by those between the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Sunni Muslim Triangle. The vast majority of Iraqi’s of the Shiite faith will, for better or worse, choose to establish their own political destiny without edicts from Viceroys of an American occupation. The Shiites may push aside the Americans if they do not step aside.

WHO IS NOSTRADAMUS’ THIRD ANTICHRIST?
(01 August 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007)
The rise of the Shia did follow. The statements I had made in August 2003 begged for an accounting six months later. Muqtada al-Sadr had become a chief potentate for the Shia rebellion. His imposing figure, black beard, turban and black penetrating eyes perhaps makes him one who would be Nostradamus’ young black man of evil intent (3 Q 60) or the “black one” in the “Bloody Alus” prophecy (6 Q33) who would make Saddam repent:

Unfortunately, my prediction about a Shiite rebellion against American occupation starting in 2004 was correct. At the end of March, American coalition forces banned a newspaper published by [Shia cleric] Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a sect of young and radical Shiites. He launched an uprising in a half dozen cities with up to 10,000 militia from his own al-Mahdi private army, assisted by Sunni guerrillas. So far (22 April) the fighting has killed 102 US troops and over 1,000 Iraqi civilians and fighters in bloody urban street fighting primarily in Fallujah, al-Kut and along streets in the Shia slums around Baghdad. US wounded are in the several hundreds.

BLACK SHADOW OVER IRAQ
(22 April 2004)

The fight in April 2004, one of the bloodiest months for US troops in Iraq so far, may be only a taste of what could come later in 2007 or in 2008, if war should expand its taloned reach by air to the nuclear installations of Iran and the ballistic and chemical gassing of Israeli streets. If America should stir the sleeping black beast of Shia anger it will cascade like a tidal wave through the streets of Shia Iraq in support of their Persian brethren in Iran with a loss of life not yet imagined by US occupying forces.

Next will try solving the riddle of the bloody Alus prophecy that may have made Saddam Hussein repent.

John Hogue
(09 April 2007)

March 2003:
Great American Caesar’s Comet!

A lover of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar will know the following story. The bard of Avon took it from Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Fair Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, obsessed over evil omens cropping up at the time her husband became dictator of Rome. The most dramatic of these was the appearance of a new comet. It had appeared over Rome’s skyline in early evenings of March 46 BCE. She believed it warned of her husband’s imminent death. Caesar had also been warned of death’s danger by the augur Vestricius Spirinna to take place on the Ides of March. Caesar, however, would have none of a woman’s hysteria about bearded stars or balk at entering the Senate on the Ides of March because of revelations surrendered from the entrails of sacrificial animals. On that day marking the mid-point of the month, he entered the Senate where a throng of senators led by Marcus Brutus and Cassius stabbed him to death. It could be said that Caesar’s own entrails spilled on the marble floor augured Brutus’ vain attempt to preserve the republic against dictators.

It now comes to me to ask, how fair Calpurnia might have interpreted an ominous sign for our American Caesar, President G.W. Bush. Back when a comet of a different kind fell just six weeks and five days before he plunged the US military headlong into Iraq?

On 01 February 2003, the US Space Shuttle Columbia made her descent to earth with mortally wounded wing, shot through unawares by debris from a rocket booster that launched her into space a week or so before. The fires of re-entry smuggled hot death through her open wing and Columbia with all her crew consumed, broke apart transiting the Texan morning skies like a great shattered comet trailing sparks.

Objectivity deemed this merely a black comedy of technical errors. But prophecy?

The space shuttle, icon of American genius and heroics, falling out of the sky ablaze is more. It is a portend, a sign of a fall from grace for America the Bold.

I wrote the following two days after she fell to earth:

Nestled in the grass in a field in eastern Texas, lies a mission patch from the fallen space shuttle Columbia. It somehow had miraculously survived its fiery fall out of the morning sky. The names of the seven heroic astronauts who died make an outline of their space shuttle. A glowing trail like a comet’s tale streaks through the shuttle’s outline ending in a many-pointed star. It is a star very similar to that filmed by a hundred amateur video cameras across Texas as it fell to earth like a flaming comet.

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible undoing of people and animals… when the comet will pass.

Has the comet [foretold above by Nostradamus] just passed?

Is this the chilling portent of things to come for America if they should hurry off to war?

Destiny holds it breath as America primes its war machine.

A PORTENT FOR WAR
(03 February 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
Perhaps a vision of a comet falling from space need not be in Nostradamus’ mind a solely natural cosmic phenomenon. He was wont to mingle poetic metaphors in his history of the future. Was he aware that much of the space debris fell over the town of Palestine, Texas; or, that the crew included an Israeli (Jewish) astronaut? A coincidence, or, more food for omen thought?

The question I posed back on 03 February 2003 may have been answered at daybreak over Baghdad on 30 December 2006. The first democratically elected Iraqi government said their morning prayers and executed a former dictator, Saddam Hussein, by hanging. It happened just before sunrise on the early starlit morning when Comet McNaught first became visible to the naked eye. In the coming two weeks, this comet soon rivaled the brightness of flaming debris thrown out of the sky across eastern Texas by comet Columbia.

Falling comets punctuated the time of the Iraqi Caesar’s descent and destruction. The power of dictatorship ripped from his hands six weeks after America’s comet fell. They tried, hung and buried him three years later after the appearance of another comet, the brightest in nearly a century. If he is Mabus, (a reverse word play on “Saddam” according to the rules of Nostradamian cryptograms), his death marks the onset of a horrible destruction of people and animals–the world’s fate following the death of Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist.

Let us return to the fate of America’s Caesar.

Tank tread graffiti on shifting sands of Iraq marked the US military’s lightning fast occupation and overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. What I had already predicted as the easiest part of this catastrophe was a mission accomplished: the blitzkrieg, panzer-style invasion of Iraq from the south by US-Coalition forces had secured the country in exactly six weeks (20 March–01 May 2003). Saddam Hussein had lost himself in the urban jungles and spider holes of Anbar Province and all that was left of any resistance were the occasional pot shots of AK-47 wielding gangs of Baathist diehards gone guerilla. George Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom had enjoyed the most one-sided successful invasion and occupation of a country since the Nazi armies invaded Holland and Denmark in 1940. The statues of Saddam began falling throughout Iraq while desert winds soon erased the US tank track paths to glory. I knew what was coming and I waited for the objective first signs of a new Vietnam to surface in the aftermath’s afterglow of quick and easy victory.

July 2003, just two months after the US president announced that all major military operations were accomplished; current events had stepped on the booby trap of prescient potential. Phase two had begun. The new Vietnam had started. It was time for me to talk about it. I ask you to remember the times in which I said the following. Such dire statements today seem commonplace, but over three years and eight months ago, my predictions were deemed radical and alarmist:

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.

NEW CRUSADES AND QUAGMIRES
(11 July 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
President Bush was a guest at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in late March 2004. It is tradition for the president to step up to the podium and cut up, show his comedic skills, etc., being his own standup comedian poking fun at his own presidency. In the past, some presidents might take a subtle jab at a joke or two, keeping their presidential pride in tact. Others, such as Bill Clinton made ambitious home movies. I recall his little “day-in-the-life” as president documentary during his last appearance at the RTCA roast in 2000. The first lady, Hillary Clinton, by then a Senator of New York, made Mr. Clinton the stay at home husband homemaker. The most memorable bit was Clinton running out of the White House chasing after his wife’s limo with her forgotten brown bag lunch. I think he had a kitchen apron on. Can’t be sure of it though.

President Bush had tried to one-up the funny on the Clintons during his guest appearances narrating rather funny slide shows. I predict the president has a future in stand-up comedy after he leaves the White House. He is that good! Anyway, the press association’s dinner held in March 2004 convened just five days past the first anniversary of the US Iraqi invasion. Bush put on one of his narrated slide shows. Up prompted a slide of Bush peering out of the Oval Office window. The president identified it as his attempt to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction. One shot after the other displayed the president looking under couches and furniture, sometimes with the aid of his Scottish terrier, declaiming, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere… maybe here? Nope.  Maybe over… here? Uh uh… dang!” Most of the banquet guests were laughing.

I know I did not laugh when the news broadcast the president’s skit. I love tasteless jokes but one has to time their delivery. Perhaps after the WMDs were found, then he could play with it as a joke about being better late than never. Those weapons were the chief reason Bush went to war. Cutting up about them before they were found, a year and nearly 600 dead Americans coming home from Iraq in flag draped coffins later, is bad timing. His coarsely timed slide show was about as tasteless as if Hitler had entertained guests at the Berghof narrating a slide presentation of the Fuehrer himself “creeping” on all fours, Blondi, his German shepherd, by his side. The slides change showing dog and Fuehrer looking under couches and furniture in the grand hall of the Berghof while Hitler is saying, “Dose Jews have got to be someveere… maybe hier? Nein. Maybe oober… hier? Nichts… Oh Scheise!… wo ist die Juden! Ha ha ah… ! In diesem ash tray?”

Three months and a death toll rising to 862 dead Americans later, after Bush’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) yuck yuck hunt, weapons inspector David Kay, the head of Bush’s Iraq Survey Group who had led the effort to find Saddam’s offending arsenal of doomsday weapons stashes told the BBC on camera the following: “Anyone out there holding–as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said–the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, [is] really delusional.”

The war has entered its fifth year this week. There is a complete lack of evidence of the existence of the WMD. They were the grounds for going to war and killing as of this writing on the Ides of March 2007, some 3,220 American, 258 coalition soldiers, plus a death toll of civilian, Haliburton and military contractors approaching 770 killed, and estimates of anywhere between 66,000 to 600,000 Iraqis. The wounded and crippled for the cause of non-existent WMDs include nearly 25,000 coalition and 7,761 civilian contractors and privately contracted mercenaries. The Iraqi wounded and injured are uncounted–perhaps uncountable.

The reasons for going to war are beyond suspicious. They are sinister. Back in 2001 the man waving his vial of dummy anthrax under the noses of the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powel, recorded a different view. There was no arguing a US case for invading Iraq. The same was true of his successor, Condoleeza Rice–the woman who would breathlessly bogey man threats before Congress of “mushroom clouds” rising over nuked US cities if we did not stop Saddam’s imminent threat of WMD use. Back in 2001 before the 9/11 attacks, both went on record saying Saddam Hussein was no threat at all. He had not the means to build or wage war with weapons of mass destruction.

What happened to change their tune?

Returning to the bulletin from 11 July 2003 where I predicted the WMDs were a ruse, I added the following:

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.)

NEW CRUSADES AND QUAGMIRES
(11 July 2003)

By the first summer of the occupation in Iraq, no one was writing nasty letters about calling it an “Oil War” anymore. The Vice President’s former oil rig construction company, Halliburton, received carte blanche bids to rebuild Iraq. How is it not, therefore, an oil war?

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.

NEW CRUSADES AND QUAGMIRES
(11 July 2003)

US occupiers, in my estimation recorded back in July of 2003, were testing with combat boot and unarmored humvee a future path through the black future of a La Brea Tar Pit of oil war woes. What would be the outcome?

John Hogue
(07 April 2007)