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.

Last things first. A number of my readers this year have been asking if I wish to reverse myself on the following forecast made in Predictions for 2010, signed off on 1 November 2009: “The Israeli Netanyahu government signaled after the Hebrew New Year (Yom Kippur) that it would hold to an end-of-year deadline before considering a military option to put out the reactor fires of the Iranian nuclear program which it suspects is a front for building a nuclear arsenal to eventually match their own. President Obama himself has not taken a military option with Iran off the table…

“Will the new year bring warplanes from Israel setting fire to Iranian nuclear facilities?

“No.

“I am happy to announce some breathtaking positive news. The window for an Israeli-Iranian war has closed in 2010 and it won’t open again for the next five years.”

I am told by some of you that futurologists (those who extrapolate future events from measurable trends) believe it obvious that war between Iran and Israel is imminent. They cite Saudi Arabia granting Israel permission to use a narrow corridor of air space near its northern frontiers to send waves of jet bombers on a short and faster root to blast Iranian nuclear installations than around the Arabian Peninsula. Just last week the Egyptian government allowed two small Israeli naval vessels transit through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea. Egypt had earlier allowed an Israeli U-Boat (a German built Dolphin Class submarine) passage to and from the Persian Gulf via Suez. This U-Boat is believed to carry cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. An Israeli sub off the Iranian shores of the Persian Gulf, along with surface vessels in tow with US Naval units aims to show that Israel can extend its naval reach right to Iran’s doorstep. It sends a message that at any moment Israel can launch a retaliatory nuclear strike on Iranian cities and nuclear reactors with atomic weapons Israel does not officially says it has.

Is war imminent? Has my oracle got it wrong as some of you wag in the comments sections of my blog?

Here is my answer: There will be no war between Iran and Israel before the mid-decade.

All the saber rattling, all the little flotilla posturing and certainly the air space permission of the Saudis is not something new. The Saudis regularly renew Israel’s permission to fly their warplanes over their airspace since July 2009. Secret deals by Mossad’s spy chief Meir Dagan or covert arrangements by a succession of CIA chiefs with the Saudis, Iraqis or the Turks to provide their airspace to Israeli surgical strikes on Iran have been either under discussion or secretly approved ever since the Bush administration started drawing up plans for a strike on Iran after they invaded Iraq in 2003. Though a new man sits in G.W. Bush’s seat in the Oval Office President Obama is not completely closing the door to the last administration’s Neo-Conservative strategic agenda. Plans to take Iran down have ever had bipartisan support in US Congress as far back as 1992 when Paul Wolfowitz authored and Dick Cheney edited the first essays on how American foreign policy needed to define and depose new threats from rogue regimes in a post-Soviet, post-Cold War. The idea to strike Iran was floated around in Washington long before these and other apostles of Neo-Conservatism crowded the G.W. Bush cabinet. You will find that many purveyors of Neo-Conservatism are also staunch Zionists even possessing duel citizenship. During the Bush era, Neo-Con think tanks were openly advising Washington “and” Jerusalem with their expert political and military scenarios engaging Iran.

As far back as early 2007, I published an eBook collecting many of Nostradamus’ astrological and prescient visions about a future war with Iran. (See Nostradamus Iran predictions.) I took the reader through an evolution of Neo-Con thinking from 1992 up to early 2007 detailing the intimate connection and shared intent of right wing US and right wing Zionist leaders and policy makers, attempting to forge a US foreign policy that matched the aims of Israeli foreign policy and strategic agendas. One cannot blame Israel, a small country in a hostile region, for seeking to dictate US policy. It is no different really than its chief rival, Iran, trying to influence the policy and strategic goals of Israel’s enemies surrounding her borders.

I elaborated in Nostradamus: the War with Iran that Israel has long kept at least one of its Dolphin Class submarines on station 24/7 in the Persian Gulf since 2006, after Iranian President Ahmadinejad made his notorious statement that Israel should be erased from the map of history. Moreover, though it may be news to many of you, the fact is the Saudis fear and loathe the Iranian Ayatollah regime far more than they do the right-wing Zion-supremacist regime of Netanyahu. In my eBook and blogs over the years, I have described large-scale Saudi civil defense drills regularly practiced in tandem with Israeli drills since 2005 onwards to rehearse national responses to retaliatory Iranian missile attacks after an Israeli air strike. Some of these Saudi rehearsals openly prepared fallout drills for towns and massive oil distillation facilities in the northeastern corner of the kingdom. They are thought to prepare for the eventuality that a cratered Iranian reactor dome should send plumes of radioactive clouds across the Persian Gulf from the nearby Iranian nuclear facility at Brushehr, scheduled for activation in the summer of 2010.

Let me make this clear, Israeli demonstrations of planes, vessels in Suez shipping lanes and Dolphin submarine cruise missile nukes on auto mobile launch command mode does not construe imminent war. These actions are a kind of “language”, albeit brinkman bunt, directed at Iran’s regime to contain it in a regional Iranian-Israeli Cold War. The Egyptians have a treaty with Israel for decades granting them access to the Suez Canal as long as their warships do not strike Egypt. Egypt’s Sunni Muslim population and Sunni President Mubarak is no friend of Shiite Persians constructing a nuclear arsenal. Neither are the Saudis. Granting Israel attack jets passage through their airspace sends a strong signal to the Iranian regime to forego further work on their nuclear weapons program because the Shiite Persian Muslim missiles pointed at a Jewish State will just as easily be pointed at Sunni Arab states requiring the Saudis saddle up their own nuclear weapons program to deter Iran.

Iran’s nuclear weapon aspirations mind you are more bluff than solid fact. Meir Dagan, head of Mossad since 2002, has stated clearly in early 2009 his belief that Iran will not have the means to build and deliver an atomic bomb until the middle of this decade.

President Obama is not seeking the military option just yet and will continue pressuring sanctions and tacit support of Saudi and Israeli demonstrations of strength. Unless the Netanyahu regime has lost its marbles and are aiming to take out the reactor at Bushehr before it goes online later this summer, this could not be a worse time to unilaterally strike Iran. Relations with Israel’s best regional friend, Turkey, are on the rocks because of a heavy-handed suppression of blockade-runners into Gaza this June. Israel’s alliance with the United States is not in good shape. It is time to mend bridges with Israel’s only real superpower friend in the world, not burn them further with a Bushehr military blunder.

One reads in Israeli newspapers a growing call to war against Iran and in some cases there are Zionist zealots openly writing that Israel striking Iran and thus becoming isolated from support by the rest of the world fulfills prophecies concerning the advent of the Jewish messiah, thus worldwide repudiation as a militant pariah is happily lobbied.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman might sympathize with such extreme views of Jewish eschatology but I do not think they are stupid enough to go it alone solely on anticipated divine approval or invitation of messianic advent. (See more about prophecies of a Jewish messiah). The Israelis will give Obama time because they have no other option short of going to war without US support. They will wait to see if a more sympathetic and hawkish Republican will unseat Democrat Obama in 2012. They know as I know that is a long shot. Mossad and the Netanyahu regime believe Obama will tire of diplomatic efforts sometime in his second term after years of getting nowhere. Then Israel will get the green light to strike Iran just before it becomes capable of constructing a workable warhead by mid-decade. They might not need jets by that time. I see the walls of Iranian reactors falling in a rain of Jericho III ballistic missiles.

The basis for this mid-decade time window relies on an interpretation of Nostradamus’ clearly defined astrological window for war with Iran.

In Nostradamus: The War with Iran, the time for possible air strikes has many astrological references. One of these suggests in Century 4 Quatrain 67, that:

L’an que Saturne & Mars esgaux combust,
L’air fort seiché, longue traiection:
Par feux secrets, d’ardeur grand lieu adust
Peu pluye, vent chault, guerres, incursions.

In the year when Saturn and Mars are equally fiery,
The air is very dry, a long comet:
From hidden fires a great place burns with heat,
Little rain, hot wind, wars and raids.

The Latin combustus adds apocalyptic nuance to the old French combust. That which is equally fiery equally burns, consumes, ruins and destroys equally two aggressors — perhaps Israel and Iran in a future war. The old French traiection is from the Latin trajectio: describing a shooting star, meteor, or a comet. A missile in modern terms. Hidden fires inside Israeli nuclear warheads on Jericho III ballistic missiles or on cruise missiles launched by Dolphin Class submarines burn the far larger target, Iran (great place) with atomic heat. The Latin adustus specifically means burned or scorched by the sun from the French incursions. In other words, raids, surprise attacks or offensives. This not only implies a surprise Pear Harbor-like strike coming from Israel but also in modern terms an Iranian backed terrorist attack using either a radiological dirty or an atomic weapon on Tel Aviv warranting Israel’s full retaliatory strike of biblical proportions. (Think Amalek.)

Nostradamus loved double entendre so we cannot rule out his describing a future time indicating global climate warming so extreme in such marginally arable regions like the Middle East that war comes from regional disputes over water rights. Even the Book of Revelation (Chapter 9, verses 14-15) describes the final battle of Armageddon taking place when the Euphrates River dries up. Currently water flow in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers falls inexorably towards critical levels through Syria and Iraq because Turkey dams their headwaters to quench the thirst of its own growing water needs. I have been warning about the threat of Armageddon when the waters dry, since 1990, see Millennium Prophecies. Such a collapse of Middle Eastern river systems or further overuse of the Jordan River by Israel and Jordan, or Palestinians and Jews exhausting the West Bank aquifers, could make climate change related wars there just a few years ahead. The 2020s will certainly see its share of resource and climate change wars when Uranus begins a long earth-and-civilization shaking transit of Taurus whilst Pluto shifts its generational upheavals by 2024 to violent and sudden revolution at the beginning of a long, 20-year transit through the sign of Aquarius.

The most important element of Nostradamus’ prophecy is the astrological dating suggested in line one: “In the year when Saturn and Mars are equally fiery.” That means the two planets are in fire signs, preferably the same fire signs. The aspect was active during a window for war that closed when Saturn finished its transit in the fire sign of Leo in September 2007.

Three years ago I explained on page 123 of Nostradamus: The War with Iran, the next time war threatens Iran when Mars and Saturn are “equally fiery”:

“Mars will enter Leo when Saturn is in Sagittarius on far off September 2015. They will not share the same fire sign until the following year. Retrogrades of both planets make for the next rare and unusually magnified interlude of equal fire signs of war from March through May 2015 and again from August through September 2016. It is possible the scenarios of war with Iran written in this book in the spring of 2007 may better reflect a US-Iranian conflict joined in battle nearly a decade from now.”

***

Now to first things last…Mabus

The other stir of excitement among Nostradamus prophecy watchers last week was President Obama appointing his current Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to head the commission looking into what went wrong causing the BP Deepwater Horizon rig fire, sinking and catastrophic oil spill. He is said to become the “Gulf Czar” responsible for the oil slick cleanup and restoration of the US Gulf of Mexico coastline, fisheries and tourist industries. Once again, this capable former governor of Mississippi and able US ambassador to Saudi Arabia rises into the limelight of public attention begging for a prophetic explanation. Ray Mabus just so happens to have a surname that is an exact match for the one Nostradamus uses to mask the name of his foreseen third and final Antichrist. (For more about the first and the second, see Antichrist.)

The night I appeared on Coast to Coast AM last Wednesday (16 June 2010) was alive with questions about Mabus’ appointment, causing host George Noory and me to spend the bulk of the second hour of three discussing what the appointment of Secretary Mabus to Gulf Czar Mabus might foretell.

Here again is the famous Nostradamus prophecy from Century 2 Quatrain 62:

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

A full reading of all the possible interpretations of who Mabus is and what are multiple inclinations of interpretation of the clues describing his fate, can be found in an eBook comprising 25 years of being on the trail of the Antichrist: See Nostradamus antichrist prophecies.

I will share this with you today. Whoever Mabus is, whether his true name hides in the right decoding of the anagram Mabus or if he is an actual man named “Mabus”, what follows in the quatrain are the consequences hatching out from his death: an unraveling of the world of people and animals. Global droughts and famines, a war of a hundred nations when a comet marks his passing or a comet-like missile falls from the sky launching the third world war.

Quatrain 77 of Century 8 takes up the story adding more details about Mabus as the Third Antichrist, the link being that Mabus, like 8 Q77′s Third Antichrist are soon and early on annihilated causing apocalyptic consequences:

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.

It is a heavy trip to unload on a man the label Antichrist who may by freak coincidence appear to be named outright by Nostradamus in a prophecy written over 4.5 centuries ago. It is not surprising therefore, that Ray Mabus first came to my attention in the mid-1990s when President Clinton picked him to be his ambassador to Saudi Arabia. No wonder many readers wrote me about the appointment. A guy named Mabus posted to the Middle East — the very region from which many believed the Third Antichrist either is born or to which he enters from the West. One then anticipates his fall through assassination as first casualty in a 27-year war, causing an unraveling or collapse of civilization and of ecological balance (a horrible undoing of people and animals).

Back in 1995, I answered those many letters with the following statement in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (published in 1997). “At this time I don’t sense anything malevolent about the ambassador, but this gives me the opportunity to look at yet another angle to the Mabus enigma. The ambassador may not be the Antichrist but a victim of such. Since the November 1995 car bombing of a US-run military training facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has ended its long exclusion from terrorist acts. From now on Ambassador Mabus has a dangerous assignment and I wish him well. I would not like to see him become the target of a future Gavrilo Princip and have his assassination trigger World War III.”

The best-laid names in Antichrist detective work can go nowhere. By the time the book was finally published with my observations, Ambassador Mabus had left Saudi Arabia without fanfare or prophetic significance, retiring from public service in 1996. Yet a decade later, he came back to my attention in late 2007 as Senator Barack Obama’s unpaid expert on Arab, Middle Eastern relations as well as the head of Obama’s Democratic primary campaign in Mississippi in 2008.

At that time I made the following prediction in my eBook Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named MABUS: “If Obama wins the presidency, the handsome and engaging Raymond Edwin Mabus may serve in his cabinet. Perhaps he will return as some special envoy to the Middle East and start doomsday tongues to wag about the return of the man who is Mabus to the region of the Third Antichrist.”

President Obama rewarded Ray Mabus with the cabinet level post of Secretary of the US Navy. Though not yet a special envoy in name to the Middle East, Mabus at present oversees 900,000 US Navy and Marine service personnel, a majority of which have been deployed to the Middle East. Mabus has frequently returned to that theater. Moreover, Obama has made him a special envoy for the Gulf Region’s recovery once (if) the BP oil spill gushing a volcanic flood of between 60,000 to what some now believe is 100,000 barrels of oil a day is plugged. It is doubtful to me that he can fulfill both jobs effectively at once and we may be seeing the able Secretary Mabus suffer in his work from yet another botched executive decision from a charming president who has come to his destiny too soon with hardly any tested executive skills prior to his election in 2008.

For the record, I pe

Ray Mabus inspecting Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding in Peascaqoula, Miss.

rsonally do not believe Secretary Mabus is the Antichrist. I think the name is a code hiding the real name of one Nostradamus intended. Still, as a scholar of prophecy, I must look beyond my own personal feelings and paint a larger prophetic picture. As you will find out by reading my eBook on Nostradamus’ Antichrist prophecies, they are clues to a mystery with many leads heavily pointing to someone from the Middle East as prime candidate. Moreover, I explain a possibility never before published. Nostradamus may have been confused by what he saw while entranced. Mabus and the Third Antichrist may be two different people in a destined collision. Not only does Ray Mabus have his name but Barack Obama’s surname easily code crunches out of Mabus if it is an anagram, as the book demonstrates. So also does his chief jihadist nemesis, Usama bin Laden.

Osama versus Obama, the latter of which has special envoy to the Gulf and Secretary of a heavily engaged Navy in the Middle East named Mabus. It is enough to confuse and misread the signs of any augury.

Indeed Ray Mabus, a physically fit and mentally sharp man in his early 60s may someday become a president of the United States. Anything is possible in this decade defined by Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in explosive Aries transits. I personally do not consider him an Antichrist figure, but he keeps coming back into view and now in his most significant, worldwide-scrutinized role to date. The prophecies of Nostradamus focus on key events and people that can change the course of destiny. I will and I think all Nostradamus watchers will have to regard the progress of Raymond Edwin Mabus more closely than ever before in the coming years.

John Hogue

(22 June 2010)

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)

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)