Friends,
First I invite you to read this message about the progress of my newest book, Predictions for 2012. Now to today’s article.

There is a lot of sensational rumor leaking out of the FBI like a broken inkwell for thumbprints, black and obscure, very messy! Apparently an Iranian-US citizen acted as go-between on visits to Teheran with operatives of the al-Quds Revolutionary Guards to pay for and hire Mexican cartel hit men to cross the US border and assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador. They would throw a bomb into his lunch plate at a crowded local restaurant in Washington DC then hurl bombs at the Israeli Embassy. The blood money pledged was ridiculously low for any Mexican cartel to reap the whirlwind of US retaliation, a mere 1.4 million bucks. That will get you  a sack of cocaine.

I have watched Iran since my Boeing 747 Air India flight made a memorable midnight run over the Persian Gulf during the first week of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980 while I was on my way to meet Osho in India for the first time.

The details coming out of FBI agent’s mouths – and flummoxing Senators debriefed on 13 October by such – are as clouded as Octopus ink and it is just as fishy. The whole story stinks to me.

It stinks of right-wing elements in the US and Israeli governments waving a false flag. These elements would still like to see plan B of their strategic goals achieved even in an Obama first or second term. This newly “discovered” Iran terror plot sounds like a semi-fictional incident (like WMDs in Iraq). It is intended to distract people away from a growing Occupy Wall Street national now “international” movement and perhaps distract people’s attention in Israel away from the steady progress of the Palestinian Authority towards some form of sovereign status in the United Nations by “trick or treat” time – Halloween.

It seems like a good time for government back door propaganda to stifle dissent in America and Israel with an ultimate and nationally uniting action. Let us make up a war with Iran and in the venture take down its Islamic Fundamentalist Theocracy. This whole terror plot smells of shadow elements in the Israeli and American governments that would like to accomplish the destruction of the Iranian regime.

That aim has been the Zionist/Neo-Conservative agenda fomented by the former Vice President Dick Cheney as far back as 1992 when Cheney as editor and a future G.W. Bush deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, authored the Neo-Con movement’s first of many evolving manifestos published after the fall of the Soviet Union. These sought to convince Americans of a new enemy to sustain the military industrial complex of the US superpower after the end of the Cold War. After the Soviet colossus fell Iraq and Iran, modestly if fairly fit the bill. They both were radically governed nations bestride some of the largest oil reserves in the world that sustained the United States “and” Western civilization with crude oil. These rogue regimes, perhaps rightfully, had to go, either by economic pressure or through unilateral invasion if global consensus was not forthcoming.

The Neo-Conservatives moved from theory to power in 2001 with G.W. Bush’s administration initially crowding their number in top cabinet posts.

Bill Kristol is the current editor of the Weekly Standard and a number of Neo-Con papers including one published in September 2000 just before the Bush-Gore presidential debates musing about the need for a “Peal Harbor” event to advance Neo-Conservative agendas. Kristol, who like many Neo-Cons enjoys dual citizenship as an American and Israeli citizen, and who also think tanks for Israeli foreign policy, has called for open war with Iran saying about this recently exposed terror plot, “We have an engraved invitation.” Since 1998, Kristol lobbied for war with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and said a fortnight after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power." Kristol advocated this stance in 2002 through early 2003 as a board member to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that lobbied hard to successfully convince Congress to vote G.W. Bush war powers to invade Iraq.

In 2000, a Neo-Con manifesto openly pondered the need for a “Pearl Harbor event” to hasten their goals. Surprise, surprise! They got one on 11 September 2001 with al-Qaeda’s aid. Now they had their national emergency and Congress grasped by its left or right leaning “balls.” The Neo-cons could make their puppet president do or say whatever they wanted because the hysteria of national unity stifled rational critics. By false flag WMD scares, they succeeded in 2003 taking down Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime. Iran was next.

US Plans for war studied and rehearsed from 2004 through 2006 were so brazen that I felt it was time to collect Nostradamus’ many references to a war in our future between Israel and America versus Iran because it seemed imminent. The first of two astrological windows for war were open during 2007. If the first closed, the next window would open in the near future in not far off 2015-2016.

In 2006, I began composing an e-book that matched up Nostradamus prophecies with the lightly veiled apocalyptic motives of leaders in the three potential combatant states. First in America’s highest office you have evangelical Christian war hawks in the Neo-Conservative cabinet of a president who famously said that “God” told him to invade Iraq and Iran was next. You had similar latter-day aspirations murmured by the Israeli cabinet and prime minister – some openly musing that war with Iran would be a portent for the Jewish Messiah soon to come. You had Iranian President Ahmadinejad loudly and notoriously proclaim his apocalyptic aspirations for Israel being “wiped off the map of history.” Even now the Iranian president opens every public speech, even before the United Nations, with a prayer for the return of the Mahdi. He is the 12th Imam, the final prophet who will reappear from his occultation to bring on an Islamic Armageddon that will take back al-Quds (the Iranian name for Jerusalem) and make the surviving Jews true believers of Islam.

The mainstream news as ever, overlooked the subconscious motivations beneath this three-way saber rattling for Armageddon. In early 2007, I deemed it was time to publish my findings about them and perhaps go on media outlets around the world exposing these prophetic motivations examining possible war scenarios of the 16^th century French prophet leading up to those purportedly recorded in the Hadith by Islam’s final prophet himself, Muhammad.

In that book Nostradamus: The War with Iran, I gathered a number of Nostradamus prophecies that pointed to a future military showdown with Persia (modern day Iran) by Western forces. These verses using contemporary names from the 16th century even mentioned the Persian Gulf and its narrow opening, the Strait of Hormuz, as the site of a future naval and air battles where a fleet will be “melted and sunk” by those of the “trident.”

As usual, there are layers to the riddles of Nostradamus’ wordplay. The seemingly obvious solution modern people might apply is a US “trident” class submarine that melts and sinks an Iranian surface fleet that consists of an armada of thousands of small boats — none of which are larger in tonnage than corvettes armed with a brace of Chinese silk missiles. Certainly the overwhelming force of Trident submarines or the hail of fiery death descending from missiles fired by US Navy carrier jets, cruisers, frigates and destroyers would be enough to “melt” and sink any suicidal attack by a flotilla of PT 109-pint sized Kamikaze craft piloted by Iranian Shahid (martyrs).

Indeed, Nostradamus may have named the US fleet obscured in another interesting word riddle. They are called “the True Serpent.” If you look down 4.5 centuries of Nostradamus’ future history of the world that has become our past, you will often find his riddles and descriptions using nicknames or flags flown by armies and or fleets of water and even air. For instance, we have “those of the Sun” in Century 5 Quatrain 11 of Nostradamus’ history of the future Les Propheties:

Mer par solaires seure ne passera,
Ceux de Venus tiendront toute l’Affrique:
Lure regne plus Sol, Saturne n’occupera,
Et changera la part Asiatique.

Those of the Sun will not cross the sea in safety,
Those of Venus will hold all of Africa:
Their realm will no longer be occupied by Sun (and) Saturn,
And the Asiatic part will change.

Reference to those of the Sun standing alone is open to many possibilities, but the reference to Venus (a code name for “Venice”) is often used by Nostradamus to describe fascist Italy during the Second World War. Though Italy had possession of Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia at the start of the war, they did not achieve control of Africa, unless this is one of Nostradamus’ alternative futures only partially fulfilled. Saturn’s color is as black as Italian Black Shirts and German Gestapo SS troops, symbols of Axis fascism

The Battle of Midway, by R.G. Smith. Three Japanese fleet carriers take direct and fatal hits from US Navy Dauntless dive bombers, turning the tide of the war on the Pacific Ocean in June 1942. "Those of the Sun will not cross the sea in safety," wrote Nostradamus 386 years earlier. Perhaps his vision foresaw the great red suns painted on the carrier decks?

Those of the “Sun” describe the third Axis ally: the Imperial Japanese fleet, visualized in Nostradamus’ nightly reveries in trance as dark gray warships flying the rising sun flag. The US Navy and the Army Air Forces would nearly sink the entire Japanese fleet in the Second World War. The fall of the Japanese empire forever changed Asia, ending its colonial hold and that of Western empires in a series of popular anti-colonial rebellions in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and also witness the rise of a sleeping giant, the People’s Republic of China.

The true serpent fighting the Persians in our future may be another reference to a naval flag. In my book about Nostradamus’ predictions for Iran, I said the following:

Every ship in this vast US armada flies the US flag and a US Navy Jack. Note that it is a flag with thirteen red and white stripes over which an American Rattlesnake crawls under the motto “Don’t Tread on Me!” It is only in recent times that all ships of the American Navy hoist this flag. On May 22, 2002, the U.S. Navy ordered all ships to display the First Navy Jack as long as the War on Terrorism continued. Ceremonies to raise the flag of the “true” serpent took place on every US Naval ship on 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the “Pearl Harbor” event that launched the world war of terrorism.

On some near future date, or perhaps as late as 2015, the “true serpent” will “invade” the waters of the Persian Gulf.

Nostradamus: The War with Iran
Chapter Six: “In the Arabian [Persian]
Gulf, A great Fleet will be plunged to the Bottom.”

The US Navy Jack displayed in a US super-carrier hangar.

So, with that said, is war with Iran about to break out earlier than the astrological window of 2015-2016?

My answer is emphatic.

It is no.

Gaming out this news of an Iranian terror plot this week is a propagandized step towards such a war happening when the astrological aspects I described in detail in the book open the potential for conflict once again about four to five years hence. Indeed the Navy Jack takes on new symbolic significance.

The true serpent flag is also the symbol of the American Tea Party. Perhaps in 2016 there will be elected a president of the United States who is a member of that “true serpentine party”? How ironic it would be if the party that often promotes America pulling out of wars in the Middle East actually got their man or woman into the White House who then led America into its third and most disastrous war.

Another scenario would have President Obama in his second term, co-opted by a Tea Party controlled Congress who pushes him into signing on to Neo-Conservative aspirations for a war after years of negotiation with Iran went nowhere. It is a fact that Obama at present has chosen diplomacy first in his efforts to take Iran out of the nuclear arms race with Israel. However, he has left the apocalyptic door open that G.W. Bush and his Neo-Con handler, Dick Cheney, had closed in their faces by events at the end of Bush’s second term.

John Hogue

(15 October 2011: The 31st Anniversary of my “Initiation”)

HOGUE PROPHECY NEWS FLASHES:
New Hogue e-Book is coming soon: Predictions for 2012

I intend to compose and complete my next almanac of yearly prophecies and get it out quickly to my readers by early December.

Here is how you can help make that happen and secure your own special edition. Read More…

Occupy Wall Street Goes Global
This is not a movement of hippies, corporate media hacks and it is far bigger and more mainstream already than the Tea Party ever was. Occupy Wall Street keeps gaining momentum across the United States with polls showing 75 percent of Americans sympathetic or in full support of the movement. This weekend it spreads to “Occupy” movements across the world in Europe, Australia and Asia.

Three thousand gathered before the London stock exchange, and six thousand plan to camp, Ziccotti Park NY style, before the European Central Bank headquarter in Frankfurt. Demonstrations where held in 50 other German cities including 6,000 demonstrators in Berlin and 1,500 in Cologne. Thousands also gathered before banks and stock exchanges in Australia, South Africa, Taiwan, Hong Kong China and Tokyo Japan.

The demonstrations in the US are at last showing results politically with Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State, Tim Geithner and Hillary Clinton sending clear signals Friday that more bank reforms are coming and must come.

On an ominous note, peaceful protests on Friday and today were eclipsed in Rome with widespread violence. The blazing cars, shattered shop, and bank glass windows of Roman streets can be the future of this movement around the world next year in 2012, because Italy is far closer to economic default. Politicians are running out of time if they do not legislate banking reforms before this peaceful global movement must get their attention by rioting.

A map of the projected tsunami issuing from the slide of Las Palmas island's western half into the Atlantic, plus the time it would take the wave to reach coastlines.

Canary Island about to Erupt?
Are Atlantic Tsunamis coming Next?

Tsunamis come in protest movements. Will they be coming as waves flooding the North Atlantic coastlines of Brazil, America and Europe? The windswept El Hierro Island in the Canary Island chain for months now has endured a significant earthquake swarm symptomatic of an imminent volcanic eruption. Unconfirmed reports of volcanic material floating off El Hierro’s coast might indicate a submarine eruption has begun.

In prehistoric times a large piece of El Hierro sloughed off into the Atlantic no doubt causing a catastrophic tsunami. The satellite photos showing a green subsea plume of a purported fissure in the island’s undersea shelf on the south side may presage an underwater landslide that might cause a tsunami, though I doubt it would generate any to match the previous monster wave that raged off its northern shore in prehistoric times.

This situation deserves watching, but some websites are practicing prophetic hyperbole by inaccurately comparing El Hierro to its larger volcanic island neighbor Las Palmas as the same, even in photos used. For now, Las Palmas is inactive, so those of you who think a 130-to-160-foot wave will crash into the US eastern seaboard eight hours after an imminent landslide are mixing your mega disaster metaphors and islands. Moreover, most of El Hierro’s tsunami energy would go south to the West African coast all the way to Antarctica, not west, if we were talking about Las Palmas.

I consulted my oracle about El Hierro. In the worst case scenario a tsunami might arise as devastating to other Canary Islands as that which flooded Japan in March of 2011. The main visitations with sporadic harbor and coastal damage like what was experienced in the Hawaiian Islands and Santa Cruz California from the Japanese tsunami would range along the sparsely populated Western Sahara southwards to the Mauritanian coast down to the city of Dakar, in Senegal.

My oracle at this point does not see a major tsunami coming out of a future eruption of El Hierro. It is much more concerned with El Hierro’s volcanism triggering a Las Palmas eruption causing half the geologically unstable, western coastal mountainside of the island to suddenly slip into the Atlantic. Such an event would be a civilization-changing catastrophe sending a tsunami up to 160 feet high roaring 4.5 miles inland over the coasts of Brazil, French Guyana, Surname, Guyana, east Venezuela, the Caribbean islands of the Lesser Antilles, and the US Atlantic seaboard!

A still taken from the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". This is what it might look like if a 160-foot tsunami should roll into New York City harbor only eight hours after the Las Palmas landslide.

Europe would also be hit by significant tsunamis between 16 and 23 feet high, nearly as destructive as those inundating the Honshu coastal towns and Sendai airport, would visit Ireland, Iceland, England, France and Spain. The Canary Islands and the nearby mainland coastline of southwestern Morocco and the neighboring nation of Western Sahara might witness a tsunami flood 300 feet high!

That danger, for now is not before us. If I feel that Las Palmas is next, you, my dear readers, will be the first to know, especially, if you are already members of my newsletter. If you are not yet members, please sign up here.

Nostradamus.

Friends,
Tempers in the Middle East, the intensity of world weather and prices, all rise. A number of you and a number of those who have recently had me as guests on blog talk and radio interviews have voiced wonder mixed equally with alarm at my oracle’s accurate assessments of world and ecological events recorded in Predictions for 2010 and Predictions for 2011 thus far.

With this in mind, I wanted to inform you that tonight, across North America (26 February 2011) the History Channel documentary Nostradamus 2012 will be rebroadcast. My interview took place in the inner sanctum of the vast Masonic Lodge in downtown San Antonio, Texas, on a hot and humid summer day in 2008. If you are able to watch the documentary, I wish concentrate on a segment in the first hour because it is the most important warning to make wrong by right actions born in the present.

I was grateful that unlike what recently happened to me in the Brad Melzer’s Decoded fiasco, the editors of 1080 Productions, subcontracted to produce Nostradamus 2012, appreciated what I had to say. They did not digitally delete me in the editing room (though they did choose to leave out what I had to say about the connection of Nostradamus to Mayan Prophecies and the Mayan Calendar purportedly ending time as we have known it on 21 December 2012). Be that as it may, what 1080 did not cut was, in my opinion, far more important than 2012, because it is something you are now directly feeling when you go to the market to buy your basic sustenance. It is impacting you long before the year 2012 arrives.

You all will continue to be feeling and dealing with this crisis long after that year and all the Chicken Littleism surrounding it is forgotten as we all plunge forward into history’s maelstrom of runaway events poised to unravel civilization in the 2020s — if we do not understand how to stop it.

Watch the show tonight, or get a CD from History Channel, or, if you are counting pennies so you can afford current food prices rising to the highest levels in modern history, watch the YouTube excerpts of the documentary. Look out for my short and pithy segment discussing how the danger of famine is the most immediate and least talked about potential apocalyptic event in everyone’s near future life.

A few more matters to discuss before we cover the main topic of this article today.

A day of rage demonstrations in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel did not make much of a stir in the news. It would seem the Arab Revolution has given Israel a respite from a direct confrontation. The shift in focus from Arabs taking down their kings and dictators to protesting what they see as the injustice of a hypocritically undemocratic occupation of Arab Palestinian lands by the only true democracy in the region, will skip this week, this month even. We will find the revolution’s focus erupting on Israel’s doorstep in the month of March.

There is a great opportunity in these dangerous times in the Middle East to see a significant withdrawal of American forces as I predicted in my forecasts for 2010 and 2011. I still hold to a prediction I made as far back as early 2009 on Coast to Coast AM, there will be a rapid withdrawal of US forces home from Iraq and Afghanistan much sooner than 2014. As I said years ago, whoever would be the next president after G.W. Bush, he or she would have to scale down US imperial reach around the world because predictably like all great superpowers, America has overextended itself can ill afford further sustaining its military reach. Economics, not Usama bin Laden, will see a US retreat and as I detailed in my forecast for 2011, this “insolationism” coming to the US has potentially positive consequences for its people.

This weekend, the day of greatest rage was in the streets of Iraq. Revolution can happen there as well, for the government experiment established by the grace of US occupation is at best dysfunctional and better serving corruption than the Iraqi people. I expect I will have to review Nostradamus’ clear allusions to Iraq in his prophecies, refreshing my interpretation as events come clearer as the times of their arrival into the present appear.

All civil wars have their lulls. This weekend, the Libyans draw a breath before the next wave of violence. Gaddafi entrenches in Tripoli, massacring dissenters in its streets, arming the pro-Gaddafi mob militias.

I am most concerned that Gaddafi will not shrink at using his vast stores of chemical and biological weapons if there be attacks on Tripoli. In addition, he has shot bomber pilots who declined to fly bombing runs on Benghazi and oil installations in rebel held eastern Libya. He replaced these with Algerian mercenary pilots who may not care what WMD they drop from their bomb bays. A NATO-US organized “no-fly” zone must be established if we possibly can prevent another Halabja massacre in Libya — the thousands killed in a Kurdish town gassed from the air by Nostradamus Antichrist candidate Saddam Hussein in 1988.

I expect that March will see my oracle’s prophecies for 2011 vindicated on the wild weather front as blizzards are replaced by tornadoes when a sudden and violent shift from winter to spring takes place in the eastern and central parts of the Untied States. The catchword for 2011 is a redoubling of everything you saw hurled at you from Mother Nature in the violent year of 2010. Christchurch, New Zealand is but a taste of the earthquakes I expect will come in the spring and summer months.

Washington DC politicians have, as predicted, played nicey-nicey with platitudinous, patronizing placations on the news about toning down their politically polarizing, violent rhetoric. It will not last. Watch it come apart in March when the budget debate begins. The legislative demonstrations you see in February move from Cairo Egypt to Madison Wisconsin and the capitol buildings of Ohio, New Jersey, etc., will come marching into the nation’s capitol building in March. You can read about what the next six months of riotous politics on the floor of the House and Senate will be like in two chapters in my 2011 e-Book: “Wattsington DC” and “Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal!”

Now I would like to at last share with you a reply I made back in October 2010 to a letter sent from a young Indian citizen named Suraj who saw a broadcast of Nostradamus 2012 in India.

***

SURAJ,
Hello sir. I am just a 14-year-old kid from India looking for answers and I’m eager for answers. I saw the documentary of yours about the prophecies of Nostradamus and am willing to study deeply about it. I am not a very bright child but I take a of interest in this subject. I have a very few questions sir and would be pleased if you answered them. My first question is … What do you think is my part in not letting these dark prophecies coming true?

HOGUE
Thank you for writing me and joining my newsletter list. When I look at what our part is in these prophecies, it is the darkness played out by us that is not our own. Our societies, religions, parents, priests, politicians and pedagogues (teachers) condition this darkness into us. One must forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. They too were programmed to automatically impart identifications and borrowed knowledge and they often did this with their sincere intent to love us, as far as they knew or thought they knew what love is. Nevertheless, all of us eventually are coated with other people’s ego habits and ego identities over that which can never be predictable. “That” which is eternal, that, which visits the realm of time (past-and-future) but lives in the eternity of the present moment, waking-sleeping, or living-dying.

The dark prophecies of Nostradamus are warnings, are pitfalls set before us that I believe the prophet wished us to be alert in avoiding, in finding new pathways to better futures. The only way I know how to do my part not to serve the dark destinies of these prophecies is to live and awaken each moment the light of my inner awareness. To do this, I must see into why I am living a habitual, unconscious, robotic identity.

You are fourteen. This is a crossroads moment. At fourteen new energies awaken and one can gain a knack of keeping the thread (the sutra) of soul untouched as you soon enter a more intense process of ego “education”.

Education is necessary. We need to learn how to live and relate in this world. The problem is, our educators are not wise. For the most part, they have only borrowed the wisdom of others. It is not their direct experience. Even authentic knowledge, if borrowed, is less valuable than your direct and existential experiences. So, the teachers being unaware of real wisdom teach us to identify with this “body-mind” vehicle we use in life.

In short, they teach us to think we are the car, not the “driver” of this car traveling the path of our destiny. So, learn all you can about how to drive the body and the mind through your life but remember that you are not this car and all of its labels of identity. You are far more than this. Your name, your mind, your body and senses, your language, and social training, etc., are only utilitarian. They are tools. But remember, you are not “the hammer” but the hand of soul that wields it.

You are wrong, Suraj, about not being very bright. I see wisdom in you. It is in your fundamental questions in this email. Keep that wisdom flame burning. Do not let education and the programming of identities suppress it.

Osho.

There are meditations from my teacher that you might find helpful. I lived in India for a time. Back in 1980, I began my spiritual journey in earnest. I had never been overseas before, yet I was compelled to travel across the planet into the unknown, seeking to lay down my junk filled head at the feet of my teacher, Osho. Meeting him was and ever is the best thing that happened to me in 1,000 lives. If you permit me, I can direct you to links and information about some of his meditations. Just click on Contact.

The most important thing is to not play a part in Nostradamus’ dark prophecies. These meditations may help.

SURAJ,
My other question is who is the Third Anti-Christ that Nostradamus talked about?

HOGUE
It is a complicated detective story. My full answer is 77,000 words long and these words comprise an e-Book called Nostradamus and the Antichrist. Click on Mabus.

There are four major candidates at this time: Barack Obama, G.W. Bush, Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The last and dead candidate has actually fulfilled more of the Third Antichrist prophecies than any other person to date. But more than this, I end the book with an essay about what I call the Antichrist Unconscious. To me in my experience, this is the Anti-Christ (Anti-Conscious) force driving all of us to be mechanical and predictable in our lives.

For the most part we can do little about any else’s ego personifications of anti-conscious behavior, but we can do something about the “Antichrist Unconscious” in ourselves. We can understand, transcend, and dispel this shadow by doing meditations that can re-light our forgotten inner witnessing awareness.

SURAJ,
And my last question… Is the world actually going to end in 2012? Because Nostradamus also predicted that there would be a World War 3 for 27 years but there is no world war going on right now, so how can the world end in 2012 if the war has not started yet?

HOGUE
Nostradamus never predicted anything for the year 2012. It is one of the biggest lies put out there by irresponsible so-called 2012 scholars. In the documentaries you see me currently in, my video spots are surrounded by these silly people who think their imaginations can trump this fact. In each show, I have countered their theories but my words are selectively cut out of these documentaries because it does not sell the show.

Nostradamus forecast the end of the world in the year 3797 A.D. We have almost 1,800 years of history yet to see ourselves through.

The Lost Book of Nostradamus that these 2012ers promote as their proof of his predicting the end of the world in 2012 is a forgery from the 17th century. Nostradamus never wrote it. Moreover, the colored images in the book are so vague that you could project anything that is in your mind as prophecy.

Nostradamus’ “2012″ was the year 1999 and it was meant to be the year when the great engine of the centuries would move again towards a new era. This process is gradual. That does not mean we are not heading for great upheavals after 1999 but the process could take another 50 to 100 years before it is through. In a few years we will all forget 2012 as just another year in a greater process of revolutionary change.

I am currently finishing an e-Book on 2012 and what Nostradamus actually wrote about our times. It also points to the inaccuracies of the Mayan Calendar which actually might place their change point in their 5,000 year cycle back between the winter solstices of 1998 and 1999, not the oncoming winter solstice of 2012.

SURAJ,
THAT is about all sir and please reply sir and these questions may seem small to you but are very helpful for me.

HOGUE
They are not small to me. They are important. So much so that I took time in my busy schedule that I cannot spare to answer them this morning.

SURAJ,
Consider me your student sir and thank you for your time. Hope to hear from you again as fast as possible sir.

HOGUE
You are lucky today. Most queries take me months and up to a year to answer. I was guided to reply to you as soon as possible. I cannot say when I will be able to answer you again, but if it is possible for you to look into the meditations and if you have a “yes” for that, then I will immediately send you that information.

It is the most valuable thing I can share with anyone.

***

If any of you wish to explore or have guidance about the meditation techniques I use, please Contact Me.

John Hogue

(26 February 2011)

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 just want to be clear that this first comment from Michael Mitrosky and my response is from September 2007. I’m encouraged that he feels, at least for himself, that I am that interpreter; however, I think we have nearly a half-century to wait and judge whether my work cuts the presaging muster as delineated in Century 3 Quatrain 94. (See the blog archives for Heirs to Nostradamus 1 and 2.). The body of John Mitrosky’s letter dwells on the Bush Administration. At that time, Bush and especially his Vice President — Cheney — were seriously contemplating and trying to somehow initiate a war with Iran. John Mitrosky is commenting about the following digital book I wrote in early 2007 about all the possible future US-Israeli-Iranian war scenarios. See in Nostradamus Iran. He specifically comments on an important and still active scenario for 2009, which along with the Israeli strike, is described in the chapter “Black Flags of Our Martyrs spreading West” as Iran’s martyr option.

JOHN MITROSKY.
You, Mr. John Hogue are the present heir to Nostradamus. There are 3 important reasons for my conclusion: (1) you are open-minded; (2) you lack arrogance and conceit; and finally, (3) you focus on why Nostradamus is important today. This third point is the crux of the matter. You rightly show that Nostradamus’ description of a war between the West/Israel and terrorists backed by Iran is the heart of Nostradamus’ message for us today. It is a double-edged sword. You reveal the stupidity of attacking Iran on the one hand, but on the other hand, it would not surprise me if right-wing Neo-Con think tanks were using your e-book on Iran to justify attacking now, before Iran takes over Iraq completely, or obtains nuclear weapons. My own feeling is that Iran will continue to try to dominate Iraq, but she will never attack first in an overt manner. Iran wants to play the martyr’s role. Iran wants to be seen in the Arab world as retaliating for aggression perpetrated against her, not starting aggression. If the West/Israel falls into this trap, then Nostradamus’ outline for the saddest, WMD, MAD war will surely come to pass. You spell out the consequences as Nostradamus saw them. You have the power and responsibility to promote your e-book to those in the West/Israel who might start this war. You must try to get them to listen!

MY REPLY
A strange opportunity has been granted to me by the information revolution. I know that all factions in the current world war of international terrorism vs. counter-terrorism read my work. From Langley Virginia to Islamabad, from Jerusalem to Teheran, from Washington DC to Moscow, my observations about Nostradamus and prophecy are read and examined.

When I discovered that those working for President Bush and bin Laden read my work, it brought a sobering responsibility. There are also many good people around the world either working quietly inside their regimes to make changes for the better who read my work and the work of others. I’m trying to submit between the lines solutions to a number of prophetically anticipated crises, or at least, dispense to those on opposite sides of an issue reasons perhaps why we all are programmed to stagger unconsciously from one crisis to the next.

I promise you, John, that I will go on with this work to effect some small part of a more positive future destiny coming for the human race. There is so much to write about that coming new human being. At this stage of the work my writing is dominated with what is wrong or about to go wrong with human destiny and why. In the next two years [2007-2009] as the global crisis of civilization sustainability becomes at last a mainstream concern, my writing will shift more and more to offer solutions to the syndrome of conditioning that has turned human beings into functional robots that repeat the tragedies of history.

Soon, I will provide a permanent bulletin linked on the sidebar of every page of my web site that will speak of Osho’s fascinating prophecy from 1982 called The Noah’s Ark of Consciousness. This article will be the first comprehensive invitation to try techniques from the science of self-observation that I have practiced since 1980. If I have insight, if there is anything that deserves your kind endorsement as an heir of Nostradamus, it was born out of practicing these meditation techniques.”

***

UPDATE–MAY 2009:
It is mid-May 2009, one year and eight months have passed since I wrote my reply. The mainstream mindset is coming around about recognizing many varied dimensions of crises about sustaining our civilization into an ever more ominous looking second decade of the 21st century. We have a new president that at least in words might soon follow them with deeds that change the human course in history for the better.

I have not been able to set up my Noah’s Ark of Consciousness page until more financial support can pay for it. Nevertheless, on this blog page I have planned a number of new prophecies series coming for the rest of 2009. These will look deeper into the mechanics of predictability that prevent human beings from growing into their full potential and enjoying a golden future. I am feverishly building a stock of 50 articles for posting through the rest of spring to the summer. Many of them speak at length about this coming new humanity and how we can give birth to it right here, right now. I need the stock of articles so I can direct my attention to writing my next digital book on the future of Barack Obama.

Thank you all for reading my work.

UPDATE—4 January 2010:
Those articles are written. Many will be posted in the coming months, as they are more pertinent now than back in May. Presidents in Hawaii “vacate” in vacation. People suffer without health care whilst US Congress enjoys a couple weeks of “Vacat”-tion before getting back to the lobbyist—sorry, I mean the “people’s”—work. Read more about what will happen next in Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(04 January 2010)

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)

I’ve seen this coming years ago… I always felt that if a Republican was elected next, he would be a moderate Republican, but he would pick a right wing vice president. I thought it would have been a woman and that’s where I was wrong in these prophecies. I thought it would be Elizabeth Dole. She came somewhat close in the fact she actually tried to run this year. But I’ve got to consider that a failed prophecy. [Still], whether it was a man or a women I felt it would be someone who was extremely right wing…If a Bush-Cheney ticket did win, we would probably be in a major Middle East war with Iraq within two years…finishing unfinished business over oil…The oil business connections with the Bush-Cheney families are very strong.

(Hogue on the Laura Lee Online,
9 August 2000)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
A presidential term of office officially begins on Inauguration Day, held in late January following the November elections of the previous year. That means the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq took place roughly six weeks after the second anniversary of their first term. The war’s launching missed being two years into the first term by only a few extra weeks.

The US military buildup for an invasion of Iraq was in full swing in Kuwait and the Gulf States friendly to US interests by the spring of 2002.

Bush ran as a moderate Republican alongside a staunchly right wing, neo-Conservative Vice President Cheney. Cheney, as it turns out, was Bush’s guru for going to war. It is also known now that Cheney had wanted to wage the invasion in the late autumn of 2002, but worldwide pressure on the US to make one more gesture toward negotiated peace with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq delayed the launch into early 2003.

The oil business connections in the Middle East of Dick Cheney and the Bush family are well known. Indeed, Cheney’s connections as CEO of Haliburton made some journalists during the 2000 elections question whether G.W. Bush’s choice of Cheney as his running mate was ethical, even legal, because of a potential conflict of special interests.

Cheney, of course, made the appropriate gesture of stepping down from Haliburton even though he still attained profits from his former company through the back door in what they euphemistically called a “retirement package” totaling $33.7 million. While he has been in the White House, Dick Cheney, considered the most powerful Vice President in the history of the office, has coincidentally seen his former company pass in front of all bidders to become flush with US government contracts on Iraq, achieving $15 billion in revenues annually, employing 100,000 contract workers and servicing 7,000 customers in over 120 countries. (See Haliburton Watch)

Who has falsely promised the American people that Iraqi oil revenues flowing through US petrol companies, like Haliburton, would accomplish the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq? The man waggishly called “The Vice President in Chief” of the United States of America.

***

I wrote the following passages in a HogueProphecy bulletin the day before Americans voted to elect either Al Gore or George W. Bush to the presidency in November 2000 elections. I described their potential destinies. The following was what I sensed about Bush’s future as the American president:

Bush . . . will reveal a lack of focus and clarity under fire. Like Kennedy before him in the early 60s, his inexperience as a statesman may color him in the minds of world leaders as an intellectual and political lightweight. Whether this view is correct or not, when leaders in the past have concluded that our president is weak it has lead to some of the most dangerous crises for the country.

I am sorry to say that I do not see President Bush being a good foreign policy president. He is an isolationist at heart. If Saddam Hussein views President Bush as withdrawn from world affairs, or weak or erratic then you may see the Iraqi dictator risk unleashing a regional-wide war in the Middle East. I believe this war could happen as soon as 2002. The flash point for such a war will be a water dispute between Israel and the new Palestinian State. Where a Gore presidency will contain Iraq there will be an eagerness in a Bush presidency to settle scores and bring about a Gulf War, Part Two. It will most likely topple Saddam Hussein but not before it gets a Bush presidency bogged down in a Vietnam in the desert and threatens America with 27 to 30 years of terrorist reprisals.

A PRESIDENTIAL PROPHECY
(6 Nov. 2000)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
Calling Bush an “Isolationist” has a certain perverse partial accuracy about it. One could argue that he actively pursues his unilateralist and aggressive foreign policy with the mindset of an isolationist. He perceives his enemies with the dedication of a narrow American perspective that will not countenance another view and his enemy knows it. That is one of the reasons why al-Qaeda and jihadists from the Shia and Sunni cells of the Iraqi resistance are ever ahead of Bush’s learning curve in strategizing their next moves in this war.

This situation draws a strange parallel to another Texan president, 40 years ago, who fought a war with Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam. President Johnson could not culturally see a reason beyond his all-American Texan “wheeler dealer” mindset to anticipate the moves and thoughts of his Vietnamese adversary.

“If I could just get Ho behind closed doors and talk with him, deal with him . . . we could end this war . . . ” Johnson once reflected, thinking aloud.

Both Texans stood in righteous and defiant intellectual isolation from their enemy’s motivations. They failed to know their enemy, worked hard at it even. What had happened to LBJ is happening now to GWB: the price of presidential ignorance is losing America a war.

In the prediction for 6 November 2000, I definitely got the flash point for war wrong. Water rights? Hardly. That may be the next generation’s excuse.  I also made Saddam Hussein responsible for triggering a Gulf War, part two, rather than see Bush as the one sparking the crisis with a rush to invasion. There will be those who will argue that Saddam “made” the Americans do invasion, because he had resisted for so long, many United Nation resolutions. For instance, in late September 2002, President Bush made one of his most persuasive speeches before the entire UN assembly. Many of his claims about Saddam having reconstituted his WMD programs and the scuds to deliver said bombs as it turned out, were bogus. Bush did offer one strong point that one could construe as a good “Saddam made me do it” argument, when he declared, “The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. The entire world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”

Saddam and an irrelevant UN made him do invasion? The last thing Saddam Hussein desired was a war with the US. He was at best, lying low in 2002, biding his time for Iraq to be released from UN sanctions. Would he have started his WMD programs again? Absolutely! Was it inevitable that we would fight a war with him–Absolutely! I have always foreseen such a war; however, success for the West and America depended on the right time for the right war. That would have been 2008, not 2003.

Both Bush and Saddam had jumped the gun on their wars. Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 before he had atomic tipped scud missiles. Bush rushed to war in 2003 before he had real evidence of a threat from Iraq, or had worldwide support. Saddam’s rush into Kuwait marked the beginning of his fall just as Bush’s rush to invade and occupy Iraq will with time mark the beginning of his final decline. After Kuwait, Saddam lingered in power for 13 years (1990–2003) and was executed three years later (2006). Bush, if he is lucky enough to survive his second term, will become a collateral casualty of his own war within five years of launching it in 2003.

The rest of what I predicted on 6 November 2000 is quite chilling to read again after nearly six and a half years have passed. Bush has shown a real “lack of focus and clarity under fire” in a war. His foreign policy, simplistic, Pandorean, and cherry picked from fact and reality.  Bush has been slow to grasp his strategic disasters, exerting too little damage control, too late, such as the “surge” of US troops into Iraq this year. He is a weak president hiding under a veneer of arrogant confidence. American enemies have profited from this.

Back in late 2000 when I began calling G.W. Bush an intellectual lightweight that would lead America into a second Vietnam and perhaps greater disasters, I received a flood of hate email. Thousands of letters!

Where is that flood of hate mail now?

Except for a few hangers on–some true blind believers in Bush’s foreign policy “genius,” the letters spit and spilling their Donald-Duckian rages my way have all but dried up and vanished like blood splattered on the sands of Iraq. To those once vociferous but now mute mailers I take your silence as grudging recognition that Bush “has” mired his country in one of the most “dangerous crises” it has ever faced. Invasion on false pretenses did not pay for the 400 billion dollar bill of occupation with a rebuilt oil infrastructure. The war on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has lost focus and resources to fight in Bush’s new “central front against terrorism” that he wedged right in the heartland of Islam–bestride the precious fields of oil. Al-Qaeda is there now where they had not been before, taking control of Western Iraqi provinces. Bush’s foreign policy has alienated America’s friends and strengthened America’s enemies. Iran and Islamic Shia and Sunni radicalism has flourished, poised to spread across the Islamic world. Democracy by the gun fails. The liberated Iraq falls into civil war and is ready to break apart. The neglected Afghanistan front–out of which the terrorists really came that attacked America–is slowly creeping back into their black hooded control because Bush’s phony war in Iraq wasted real resources, treasure and blood of the United States.

Can there be any better evidence that the most powerful country on earth has been led by a lightweight, mediocre mind?

***

In Part Three of “Between Iraq and a Hard Place” we look at how 9/11 refreshed my take on the future Iraqi war and gave America a mission to accomplish catastrophe.

John Hogue
(19 March 2007)

Under Saturn’s transit of Leo in 1947-1948, British India was ripped apart by partition into two new states, the Hindu dominated India and an Islamic Pakistan. The birth was bloody. Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing displaced tens of millions and killed at least a million people. Israel was born in war with its Arab neighbors under this aspect back in 1948. Once again, more ethnic cleansing ensued. First, the Arabs tried to push the Jews to the sea and failed. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their lands now taken over as part of Israel. There were massacres committed by both sides, though small in comparison to what had happened in India.

Grim Saturn has been over us in Leo since July of 2005 and the stellar clock chiming the time for war has followed him. Since then, the shadow of his sickle overshadows the Middle East. It was in July of 2005 that the Iraqi insurrection began turning the tide against the Americans occupying Iraq. That was the beginning of a sharp escalation of sectarian violence between majority Shia, now in power after the fall of Saddam and the Sunni Iraqis from power.

War keeps spreading under the influence of this transit. Israeli on Palestinian fighting began again last summer (2006) and now it becomes a low-grade civil war of Palestinian on Palestinian in Gaza and the West Bank. Last summer under Saturn in Leo’s spiked power under a conjunction with the planet Mars, Israel went to war with Hezbullah in Lebanon, and with Hamas in Gaza. The Iraqi Civil War–long smoldering–fully erupted and now the US occupiers and Iraqi security seem unable to put out the fire. It is about to go out of control.

The purveyors of failed military strategies in the White House are deaf to criticism. Indeed, they only change the phrase and continue to push harder down their paths to “stay a course” to blunder. Such is what I warned would happen in bulletins years ago about how Saturn in Leo would shorten tempers, foment stubbornness, and sharpen dismissive reaction to constructive criticism in our leaders.

The final transit of Saturn through the last ten degrees of Leo begins this June and ends in September 2007. That is when the winds of war will run hottest. Mars enters Aries in mid-May 2007 and stays there until late June. Mars will trine (positively aspect) Saturn in Leo and thereby magnify their powers from 9 to 14 June 2007.

Will Mars be magnified as a God of War, or a God of new and happy enterprise? Neptune, the spiritual ruler of the Zodiac is in Aquarius. It will exactly oppose Saturn. Thus, Mars magnified with karmic Saturn, will strap on his armor and intolerance as a self-deluded God of war. When Neptune is opposed Saturn, the ruler of spiritual enlightenment becomes the vessel of unconscious desires for irrational violence and war. Leaders do not reason but march with open eyes into catastrophe, never completely knowing why. Leaders with a potential for delusions of grandeur or those suppressing a messianic complex could experience fervent fantasy visions of divine transmission while locked in emotional states of prayer. God, they think, comes to them, speaks to them about going to war. A leader and nation can fall into a collective martyr complex–there is a lot of that going on in the Middle East these days.

Astrologer Frances Sakoian gave good advice for any seeking a way to turn the Mars-Saturn trine to diplomatic advantage and avoid war when she said: “The virtues of frank and aboveboard dealings should be cultivated, since a conflict which is openly discussed can often be worked out. In extreme cases [people born with this aspect] are cunning and deceitful, or are victimized by others who are.”

In short, a diplomatic solution also has its best chance at a few minutes before the midnight-mare of a US air strike on Iran this summer, if diplomats on both sides can cut through the cunning and saber rattling crap coming out of Teheran and Washington DC and use reason to forestall a war.

The US President’s natal chart also has Neptune squared his Sun. A president with this ill-favored aspect can be under the delusion of a messianic complex. He would believe a higher power talks to him. He has openly admitted to talking with God and making decisions God wanted him to make.

When the Mars trine Saturn’s opposition with Neptune passes over the head of the astrologically afflicted and delusional US president in mid-June, he may yet again “think” God has told him, to strike Iran (if the president has not already done so before then).

He will decide to launch his air strikes on Iran, if he has not already done so, as soon as March 2007 in concert with Israel.

We will be living in a different world when the first US bombs fall on Iran.

The Middle East will suffer three full-blown civil wars: Palestinian versus Palestinian, Lebanese versus Lebanese and Iraqi on Iraqi with US troops in the crossfire.

America and Israel will be at war with Syria and Iran.

Saddam Hussein will have two of his worst predictions fulfilled: His “mother of all battles” will begin in the Middle East. Pulled like a moth to the fires of that battle, the US president will push ahead with the “Stalingrad” Option in Baghdad. Saddam will get his prediction fulfilled, though years late and fought by others rather than his own forces during the American invasion in 2003. The city will become the “Arab Stalingrad.” Sadr City will be its chief urban battleground.

Before the Shia dominated government of Iraq hung Saddam Hussein he prophesied that with his death so dies Iraq. He will be proven a prophet this June through September of 2007. At that time, Iraq will begin its breakup into what will eventually become three nations. It will be bloodier than the partition of India during Saturn’s pass through Leo in 1947. Mars conjoined with Saturn in Leo at that time as well. Mars was with Saturn in Leo when the first Arab-Israeli War broke out in late November 1947. Because of the war, the United Nations reported 711,000 Arab and 800,000 Jewish refugees were created. This time the aspect could displace millions of Sunni, Kurd and Shia Iraqis, slaughter far many more people than the Indian Partition and topple a Middle Eastern nation. When the dust settles and the blood runs dry, three shattered nations will there be in the place where “Iraq” once was. They will be divided upon ethnic and religious grounds.

There will be Sumer, the name of the new Shia Theocracy that was once South and Central Iraq. It will be a satellite of Iran.

Next will be Kurdistan, the most Western sympathetic and least failed of the new states. It may soon find itself imperiled by war when Turkey invades from the north in an attempt to suppress Kurdish independence spreading to Kurdish minorities across Turkey’s eastern provinces.

The third and most failed state born out of the mother of all Arab civil wars will be the “new Babylon”, that was once the Sunni Triangle–the city state of Baghdad. A haven for terrorism.

The city of Baghdad will be divided for generations, just like Jerusalem had been when barbed wire and sporadic fighting divided its Arab and Israeli citizen from 1948 to 1967. What is left of Baghdad will be divided by the Tigris River–the Shias on the east bank, the Sunnis on the west bank.

No one in public office has at the time of this writing, dared to openly entertain the next and unavoidable reality facing Americans in Iraq, except US Senator Joe Biden. If in the end he becomes president, or H. Clinton or Giuliani, they will all have to face reality and forge new relationships with the remains of Iraq by 2008. Of course, this prophetic reality of Iraq’s breakup may take longer to fulfill itself in time, but its time is coming. The sowing of its bitter sectarian harvest is at hand.

Another potential president, Senator McCain, has grasped what the US needs to do to win the war and keep Iraq unified.

The McCain Plan to flood Iraq with US troops to garrison every population center would be the right strategy to end the insurrection. If Iraqi rebel forces found themselves leaping out of the frying pan of a troop ramp-up in Baghdad only to find themselves jumping into the gunfire of another large US buildup in any neighboring urban center, they would be destroyed. Under the watchful and tight security of hundreds of thousands of extra US soldiers in Iraq, you would see a horde of construction and infrastructure projects across the beleaguered country move forward. The power grid would be restored. The oil would flow. The successful model of US protection of Iraqi Kurdistan would spread under such a massive US reinforcement across large tracks of the Sunni Triangle. When there is restored infrastructure and street security, there will be prosperity and jobs–the greatest weapon against the spread of radicalism. Order must be restored before the Iraqis can be trained to govern and police themselves.

The McCain Plan will lead the way to victory and the way out of Iraq for US troops.

Pity that happy future, for it will never happen. The time to give birth to that future is gone.

McCain’s bold and brave stance has come too late. The right solution has come too little, too late. If it had come in 2003–2004 there was a chance of success in sustaining the concept of “Iraq” as a united, ethnically diverse nation with an economy revived by enough security to guard its greatest export, the third largest global source of oil. The oil would have paid back the US its half-trillion investment in nation building. There would be troops on the Iran-Iraq border blocking Iranian insurgents, arms and money for Shia militias. There would be US Marines blocking Sunni and al-Qaeda insurgents sneaking over the border from Syria.

You cannot expect a seriously wounded country to get up and run after the right destiny. Iraq is grievously wounded by decades of dictatorship, war and a conditioning that is pre-programmed to be inherently indisposed to democratic ideas. Iraqis needed the time to heal, recover, deprogram and regroup. What have they from us? An undermanned US occupation cannot stop an insurrection from punching and picking at Iraq’s wounds. Thus, the country of “Iraq” has neither the time nor the energy to heal. Its wounds break open. It bleeds, while the US president these days says something akin to, get up and run for democracy. Why are you limping along?

There are many futures stillborn by wrong-headed decisions.

If the Bush administration had sent a half-million troops for two years’ occupation time in Iraq after the invasion, there was a chance to save Iraq

I said on radio shows in November 2006 that an anemic shadow of the McCain plan will be offered by Bush. It will hasten what Biden has already foreseen–that “Iraq” is an illusion.

The year 2007 will see America caught between “Iraq” and a hard place.

I have already said in Part’s 1 and 2 of this bulletin what needs to be done. All constitutional pressure must be brought to bear to stop a self-deluded president from the United States from dragging us into the opening stages of a generations-long Third World War. The magic key is in the words of diplomacy not the weapons of war. It is time to end US addiction to fossil fuel, while we take a decade to slowly, and painfully, withdraw from the Middle East, while we help Iraq to make its breakup as soft a crash as possible.

The main reason why America’s leaders and it peoples will suffer one world disaster after another is that Americans have lost their timing with history. The sooner the voters and the leaders they vote into office understand this, less in number and intensity will be the blows coming from playing catch-up history with tardy McCain-like plans.

Is a wider war therefore unavoidable?

The war will come. Almost nothing seems capable of stopping it. Perhaps it must come. There is a time for war and a time for peace, says King Solomon in the Bible. The will to war assuaged may bring about a will to peace. When all the players in 2007 are confronted with spilling the infernal first blood of what will become the world’s closest brush yet with biblical Armageddon, maybe the shock will wake them up. Mars energy, the God of War energy, can also become a force of creative, life affirming, and daring enterprise. Mars rules the explorer as well as the warrior. What could we explore beyond wasteful warfare? Mars is the high priest holding the caduceus rod of the healer. What are we ready to heal?

Strangely enough from 2007 through 2008, as the Middle East gets far worse than we have ever seen before, it is closer to getting better. The horrors of war, even war using weapons of mass destruction, could shock the world out of ever using them again. When the warring neighbors set close in physical proximity and enmity should at last abandon themselves to their repressions, lash out, and devastate their shared neighborhoods in the community that is the Middle East, they may see their folly. They may reject their doomsayers who led them to this. No Messiah will come to save them from themselves, be they Jewish, Christian, Sunni or Shia Moslems. They will have to save themselves, and open God’s eyes when their eyes open. Feel God’s love when they love one another. How can God not be blind and loveless in the world when we are blind and loveless to each other?

When the Middle East erupts this year, the regional quagmire will become the world’s quagmire. The whole world will HAVE TO HELP end and heal the strife there. The effort to venture out of hell will begin in 2008. It may take a whole long and dark cosmic night to complete the healing process by 2044.

It will happen.

There is another future timeline. There is a solution. This year as war approaches and the consequences of a Second Holocaust loom for the Jews in Israel. The Persian Armageddon of Ahura Mazda also threatens Iranians. We will begin to see some brave Israelis, Arabs and Iranians and perhaps even a few American leaders dare expose what has caused the danger, and what must be done by the whole world to prevent it, or at least soften the coming blow.

There are two repetitive rules in military history about arming for peace: If you build them, they will come to be fired. If you seek security through introducing WMD (weapons of mass destruction), your enemies will make them too.

America made the mistake Israel has made with the atomic bomb. When America fashioned its first bombs there were none in the world. When Israel built its first A bombs none existed in the Middle East. America started building hundreds of bombs when no other nation had them. They created the arms race, compelling the Soviet Union to catch up for its own safety. By the time the Soviets built their first Atomic bomb America had at least 250. That is about as many as some weapons monitors conservatively estimate Israel now possesses as Iran struggles to catch up with its own weapons program.

In the end, the Israeli State has brought nuclear weapons into the Middle East region. If they had not done so, there would not now be an arms race in the Middle East. Israel has built its own nuclear oven for the Second Holocaust. When enough Israelis see this, they will start dismantling the oven. If they do not see it, the world will have to make them dismantle it.

This year you will begin to hear people dare propose that securing safety in the Middle East secures the further survival of modern civilization. A use of any WMDs in that region could shut down the flow of oil that fuels just about everything the world needs to survive. It is not just an Israelis against the Muslim world issue. WMD possession by anyone in the region directly affects you, wherever you all live.  If the oil flow stops the engine of supersystems that flies the planes, drives the trains, propels the ships that transport your goods, your food and dry goods imports will stop. If there is a war between Iran and Israel even you living in America could suffer famine. WMDs in the Middle East threaten the whole world. A solution to their existence there must come from a world united against such weapons being there at all. No one near or standing over the source of civilization’s industrial lifeblood should possess these weapons.

Beginning this year, you will hear the first calls for a worldwide sanctioning of Iran “and” Israel. The voices will be few. They will be persecuted. They will be called anti-Semitic, but actually, they are pro-Semitic. They aim to keep every Jewish and Arab “Semite” from dying in a nuclear holocaust. Eventually more will join in their call. More will find courage.

This is what they will propose:

If Iran does not allow invasive and permanent inspection of their nuclear industry by the United Nations then the whole world should boycott all Iranian oil exports. If Israel does not allow UN inspectors in to monitor the sequestering and dismantling of its estimated 250 to 400 nuclear weapons then the whole world should cut off all aid and economic ties with Israel until it complies. It is a fact that Israel cannot function without the aid it receives primarily from America. Iran without its one true export cannot function if no one, like Europe and China primarily, buys its oil.

Sooner or later, an end to the danger of Armageddon in the Middle East will require the rest of the world’s intervention through embargo of these two belligerent states–one actively seeking, and another already piled high in doomsday weapons.

No man or nation is an island, completely unto itself. We live in a community of the Earth. What may start as a compassionate intervention in the Middle East by the rest of Earth community may yet succeed and widen the call to dismantle all WMD weapons across the planet in the coming 36 years.

It sounds Utopian.

It is!

I predict that only the Utopians know the way outside the doomsday box. Their solutions will not sound so far fetched when they are the “only” good options left.

One last prediction.

In the next 24 months, my bulletins to you will change their focus somewhat. Now that we have entered the sunset over the childhood time of humanity, the rocky road of adolescent civilization is before us for the next 36 to 100 years. My “oracle” will pour more solutions into the mix of dire soothsaying because at last the times are trying enough that a critical mass of people want to “see” and “hear” solutions foreseen to all of our present problems.

History is the chronicle of time. Prophecy, when it is most helpful is more than a scrying game foreseeing future times. It is about visions dispensed with the right “timing.”

Many of you will wonder as the pace of travail quickens and the times seem to darken further how humanity can survive, let alone spiritually transform. You will look upon humanity and despair. However, I predict as times darken, many of you will move your soul attention beyond this despair and darkness because you must. The hidden blessing of dark times makes it imperative to look within to something undarkened, untouched by the times, indeed, untouched by “time” itself. Many of you will begin to understand “because” of the momentous events taking place with greater speed around you that humanity does not and cannot transform itself to a higher conscious and loving nature.

Only you can do this.

Only individuals make this transformation.

You can make this transition from being a part of the old and negative humanity to becoming the human being of the future, right this moment. If you do this, that will be enough for humanity, because if your transformation from old to new human is authentic, you will have an atmosphere of peace and love around you. It will draw others into your space. They will then work to attain the same transformation. The light will be passed to others by example and being, not by “doing” it. Then it begins on its own, passed from individual to individual. The light flame of consciousness passes to the unlit candles of other human individuals until one day, we look around and see a revelation: humanity has transformed.

The way to lighting candles in yourself and others is called “meditation.”

I can share with you the meditations that help me light my own candle to bring light into these darkening times. Say the word and I will present them as my New Year’s present to you.

Happy New Year–Happy new human!

John Hogue
(08 February 2007)

***

Back on the eve of the presidential election, almost seven weeks ago, I used astrological divination to predict why President Bush’s natal position of Saturn, in relation to America’s natal Saturn, guaranteed him victory in the presidential elections over John F. Kerry:

“G.W. Bush’s destiny will be karmically magnified–for better or for worse–on election day, 2 November when Saturn transits 27 degrees Cancer in virtual conjunction over his natal Saturn position at 26 degrees Cancer. The good news for Bush is that the US birth chart has Saturn sitting in Libra at 14 degrees. That means Saturn’s current transit over Bush’s natal Saturn position magnifies an ultimately positive though difficult uphill battle to final victory in the 2004 election. Bush will win but other negative aspects to Bush’s natal Saturn in his chart on that day will also magnify all of his limitations and weaknesses as a leader in his second term.”

Bush did win a hard fought presidential campaign, regaining enough popular support after a dismal showing in October’s presidential debates to beat his opponent by 3.5 million votes on 2 November 2004. Though some Democrats seek resolution of ballot disputes in Ohio and Florida, I predict no re-count will countermand what has been a clear Bush victory. On 2 November, the second term of G.W. Bush was born, astrologically speaking. Saturn’s karmic candidate will be president. What signs does a divination of the stars and their positions give us?

America will face four more years of a man struggling to transcend one of the most afflicted astrological birth charts in the history of American presidents. Bush’s Jupiter (ruler of higher mind, religion and expansive thinking) is squared (aspected negatively) with his Sun (the ruler of his ego). That square can make him spiritually self-righteous and narrow minded. He will be a man who cannot admit he has made a mistake.

Bush’s Jupiter is also squared his Saturn (Karmic ruler). This aspect in a president can make his mistakes in policy potentially catastrophic for his nation.

His Sun (ego) is squared his Moon (ruler of emotions). That means his emotions are often at odds with his personality.

It gets worse.

Bush is the unfortunate recipient at birth of Neptune squared his Sun.

Noted astrologer, Frances Sakoian, once described this as “the aspect of self-delusion, par excellence.”

She said the following on pp. 354-55 of her classic “The Astrologer’s Handbook” (co-written by Louis B. Acher in 1973):

“If the natives [born under this aspect] are mystically inclined, they often consider themselves the chosen vessels of some Master or Divine Being. This belief is often the result of an unconscious desire for importance

“These persons can be vessels in a pure sense, but only if the rest of the horoscope shows a good mentality, humility, and realistic practicality. A well-developed Mercury and Saturn will do much to offset the negative effects of this square.”

Astrologically speaking, there is no denying that President Bush’s Neptune squared the Sun makes him a medium.

But for what, and whom?

The former Prime Minsiter and perhaps future Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, recalled in an Israeli newspaper article from early 2003, Bush saying: “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act…”

Earlier this year, Bush famously told the world on CBS “60 Minutes” news show that he did not take advice from his father, the former president, but listens to “a higher Father.” Inferring that he talks–and receives–messages on policy decisions from God.

Bush’s Mercury (ruler of the intellect) is sextiled (positively aspected) with Neptune. However Bush’s Saturn is so ill aspected that Mercury offsets little of its negativity. It is possible that Mercury’s positive inclination might see the right people at the right time persuade him that perhaps God is not always telling him when to go to war.

Bush’s Saturnian self-delusion as a medium, unfortunately, will only gain strength because of his clear victory this November. His illusions once had a “mandate” only from the Almighty. Now it includes a slim majority of voters, of which include the deciding edge in his favor of bloc voting Christian fundamentalists. Now, when the president talks to his god before making monumental policy decisions, little Mercury in Bush’s chart must feel like he is banished to the porch outside the Oval Office and Saturn has locked the window doors after him. Bush’s natal Saturn has a far more powerful influence on his psyche because it is squared Jupiter (ruler of his higher mind and religious potentials) and squared his Moon (the ruler of emotions). Little mental Mercury will find it hard to convert Bush from making snap gut judgments and rigidly keeping them. Saturn squared Neptune nourishes Bush’s blind faith in his “divine” calling to be president. A negatively aspected Neptune (ruler of illusions) whispers in his heart of hearts. It is not God. It will be almost impossible for Bush to understand that the voice he hears is his subconscious ego, prompted by “others.”

THE SHAPE OF AMERICA’S ATONEMENT TO COME

The power of Saturn magnifies Bush’s ability to win a close election on 2 November 2004. Controversies will leave the final victory “afflicted.” He will fulfill his destiny–and that destiny is karmic. He will be sworn in for a second term as president of a deeply divided nation. His reelection will be a cosmic sign that Americans have semi-consciously chosen to endure a Saturnian gauntlet of national atonement.

For now, I will describe this negative karma in the broadest astrological colors.

Countries go through chapters of life just like people. Now America has entered the difficult teenage years of its destiny. It is perhaps the most powerful adolescent country in history. Power linked to adolescent immaturity can lead to bullying others with an arrogant disregard of facts or the realities of the surrounding community of countries. A strong, impatient and self-opinionated minor prone to bullying invariably finds comeuppance. All countries in their life cycles lose a fight they should not have instigated. Saturn’s transit through Cancer, then Leo, and Virgo, in the coming four years will see a few American thumpings by reality.

It will be a collective experience in the school of historic hard knocks for all those Americans who elected Bush back in office. The same goes for all those who did not vote at all, and those in opposition who chose a mediocrity to run against the president. The transit of Saturn could help them all learn, and become a better nation from their collective mistakes.

The lessons of Saturn began in June 2003, when it entered the Sun sign of America–Cancer. The end of June saw America establish an interim government in Iraq. Bush and his cabinet dreamed that a milestone had passed and peace would settle on Iraq. Saturn soon upended dreams with reality. The violence of the Iraqi insurgency escalated instead. Bush pledged in his first term to be a uniter. After Iraq, his dream has become the Saturnian reality that Americans at home live in a national house divided into cultural and partisan camps of “blue-liberal” and “red-conservatives.” Saturn here is teaching the president and other Americans that they now belong to a dis-United States.

Life under Saturn in Cancer, on the one hand, can be a time of delays and postponement and on the other, a time when confronting uncomfortable truths cannot be postponed. For instance, the Bush administration first tried to delay and finally failed to suppress the formation of the 9-11 Commission that investigated what part the administration played in the security failure that led to America’s attack by terrorists on September 2001. It so happens that the 9-11 Commission began its investigation shortly after Saturn entered the ruling sign of America. Half way through Saturn’s transit, the commission released its report at the worst of times for Bush, just before the presidential elections rather than after, as he desired.

At the beginning of Saturn’s transit through Cancer, it began exposing other illusions in other investigations the Bush administration could no longer suppress. Chief among these was the reality that weapons of mass destruction never existed in Iraq. Thus, the grounds for going to war was an illusion. The war and the dying, and the loss of US prestige in the world is based on either sheer incompetence, or fraud. For the sake of nonexistent WMD, so far 100,000 Iraqis have paid the ultimate price. [Add to this 1,345 US, 260 Coalition forces killed, and nearly 10,000 confirmed wounded to date on 21 December]. Saturn in Cancer had exposed America’s historic conceit–its rush to shoot first and check for reasons to go to war later. Soon, it may very well lose them a war they never needed to fight.

A citizenry in collective denial is another aspect of Saturn transiting through the birth sign of a nation. The people of America just did not want to deal with Iraq, with deficit spending, with a bungling presidency that let terrorists fly right in to New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon. Even those in opposition to Bush’s policies did not rally behind reformers of their party. They did what people do under Saturn in Cancer, follow their leaders, follow the status quo–postpone the debate, the reform, postpone facing facts.

Because Bush will be reelected this will be a sign to the world that Americans have not learned their lesson, that unilateralism does not play well in the new global world. Saturn will push harder. The remaining seven months of its transit through Cancer will see America further isolated from the family of nations. Alliances will weaken. American troops will be virtually on their own in Iraq as it descends into civil war. The hemorrhage of outsourced American jobs will continue to bleed. Rather than lead the world in cleaning the environment, America will lead the world in destroying it, setting the stage for international sanctions against American products and polluting industries. The epicenter of global economy will continue shifting to Europe and Asia. Americans could retreat into denial under a second Bush administration, hiding in their Cancerian shells, projecting an illusion of how the world should be, and how it should give respect. They will resist facing the world as it is, or face the reality that at present they do not deserve the world’s respect or its compliance.

The challenges of Saturn in Cancer on a national scale require Americans face and transcend a desire to isolate themselves as a country. Karma compels them to face their mistakes in global unilateralism and in Iraq, and take stock of delusions of conceited grandeur. Americans must also stop living in denial that their economy and democracy are in peril and in need of true reform.

The country under the transit of Saturn in Cancer suppresses a fearful, insecure and angry nation, ready to explode. If we do not find a way to creatively release this pent up frustration the explosion will come in Saturn’s transit through Leo beginning in July 2005. The two-year passage could see American policy become even more bellicose, reactive and self-righteously arrogant towards other nations. A gathering economic crisis over oil will come as early as next summer (2005). The Bush administration will react rather than respond during such an emergency, becoming dictatorial. The president will widen the war on terror rather than contain it. Hubris in the White House, talking to God, will not have eyes to “see” or ears to “hear” that nuclear proliferation, like Iraq, could go out of control in the next four years. Once this window of opportunity to stave the plague of atomic weapons is closed, destiny will play itself out in nuclear bush wars with third world nuclear powers any time from late 2005 through the 2030s.

What is the president’s response to this challenge? Apparently “God” has told him to scrap the ABM treaty, seriously consider ignoring nuclear test ban treaties, and embark on his own nuclear proliferation campaign. Pentagon research and development of low yield, bunker busting nukes are on the fast track in the next four years. Perhaps we will see them “tested” on the subterranean nuclear facilities of North Korea and Iran sometime after summer of 2005.

Saturn transiting Leo is often the sign for war, or a sudden escalation of current wars. There is a high chance of an Israeli-American air strike on Iran’s nuclear power centers and missile defenses any time after mid-July to October of 2005. It could also come later after the mid-term US elections in November 2006 through July of 2007.

North Korea’s nuclear facilities may also come under attack in the first six months of 2006. A preemptive strike on North Korea is less likely than Iran, unless Bush’s higher “Father” tells him to destroy North Korea’s missile bases before they can arm their warheads with atomic bombs.

American sons and daughters will be drafted to bolster occupying forces in a widening war in the Middle East no sooner than late 2005. They will go submissively the day the nation understands that the chaos in the Arab oil fields threatens to undermine oil production and the American economy. American children will go to war, not because of weapons of mass destruction, not because they are on a crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East. At last Saturn in Leo will expose the real reason why this war was forced on the American people by the Bush Administration: they believe America must control the oil regions or lose its affluent–oil effluent–way of life.

Saturn in volatile Leo wants to teach Americans a necessary lesson: Get real. Return to the path of the just. Make practical changes in domestic and global policies. American opposition leaders need to appeal to the humble angels of the American nature by the mid-term elections in 2006; otherwise, Saturn in Leo will spike national egoism breeding a rush to confrontation and disaster. Politicians running for office in 2006 should call upon the voters to return to basic American principles for justice, fair play, equal rights and representation for all. Strong third party movements, or reform movements inside the existing two-party system, may help incline America’s destiny towards following an accurate American reality; namely, that we are a divided nation in need of healing. We are oil addicts that need to get clean. For instance, if Americans get real about their fossil fuel addiction, they need not send their children to stain the sands of distant oil fields with their blood. They can send them not far from home to galvanize a depressed domestic economy with a ten year plan to modernize the US infrastructure, and maximize fuel efficiency.

Revive the “can do!” American spirit.

The people who could go to the Moon in ten years can solve problems, creating alternative energy sources for fossil fuels and break free from an addiction for Middle Eastern oil. Americans have ever redefined themselves. They can redefine their economies and redefine their American way of life once again for the better–for freedom’s sake.

The right use of karmic Saturn in assertive Leo could give birth to this core change in America’s destiny any time from 2005 through 2007. The wrong use of Saturn in Leo will deepen the danger of fascism at home, addiction to fossil fuels, and intensify acts of imperialism abroad. Americans could truly become for the first time, the “bad guys” in the world.

Let that not happen, America!

Saturn passes from Leo into Virgo in September of 2007. A majority of Americans will either throw blame or be ready to creatively “discern” what has gone wrong since the pivotal election of 2000 led them astray.

American can put aside bullying when Saturn passes through Virgo and can again become a citizen in the house of nations. To do this, enough American leaders and citizens will surely need to come to their senses in time.When the next presidential election approaches, this country could be faced with perhaps its most dire crisis to date in this young century.

At the onset of Saturn’s transit through Virgo, in 2008, hotheads running the government of Taiwan will attempt to declare permanent secession from the Chinese mainland. China’s leaders, they believe, must make the Summer Olympics China’s international coming out party. What better time to declare independence when China would not dare invade Taiwan and risk a global boycott of the games?

I tell you, little bureaucrats of Taiwan, China will invade you nonetheless if you secede. They will do it “after” the Olympics are over in early September 2008. They will invade despite the proximity of US carriers in the Western Pacific.

They will take Taiwan back, America. Are you–should you–be ready to go to war with China over it? Shall your new Secretary of State Rice stay the hot passions of Taiwanese secessionists with tempered and skilled diplomacy before the plunge?

Let me put it this way, in a variation of the Dillon song:

The future times, they “can” be a’changin’, if Condi Rice, or more likely her replacement as Secretary of State in the latter half of Bush’s second term, is a real diplomat and not just playing the “mouth” of Bush Corp.

During these first difficult and Saturnian years of national adolescence Americans will have fallen, stumbled and hurt themselves as a nation. These tough and necessary lessons could bring wisdom to an adolescent country. Perhaps an older-yet-wiser America may yet fulfill what Nostradamus intimated in one of his prophecies. There is an alternative future to a calamitous war “under Cancer”–the Sun sign of America. In Century 24 of Quatrain 6, Nostradamus may predict that Americans after Bush’s second term could “anoint” a new leader who will “bring peace to the earth for a long time.” See the following related bulletin at: G.W. Bush.

The future is full of unexpected promise for this great nation. America’s adolescent era may lead in 50 years to its loss of outer power and the prestige inherent in being the world’s last true and global superpower. When the fires of empire vanish, America will turn within. Its grandchildren and great-grandchildren will become introspective and launch a spiritual revolution across the world.

This is not the end of America’s glory, it is the beginning.

America’s greatest destiny begins in the latter half of the 21st century when it will become the cradle of a new religiousness in a New Age. Saturn kindly and richly rewards those who learn their lessons.

John Hogue
(18 December 2004)