Buzzsaw Haircut

Bush’s Bible Code

By Jason Colavito

In late February, a group of senior officials in the Department of Defense gathered in secret to hear information about the location of the al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, still unfound a year and a half after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The military men spent several hours listening to Michael Drosnin tell them how the Bible contains a hidden code that predicts bin Laden’s exact location. Further, all the events leading up to the Apocalypse can be found in this code that the author believes space aliens placed in the Bible. Defense officials told the New York Times they did not know Drosnin was peddling Biblical prophesy, but they listened all the same.

Drosnin is the author of two best-selling books, 1997’s The Bible Code, and his new one, Bible Code II: The Countdown. Despite being debunked in the Skeptical Inquirer in both 1997 and 2003, he continues to land on best-seller lists. Drosnin claims that looking at the letters of the Hebrew Torah in mathematical ratios (that is, every fifty letters, or every thirty, or whatever), one can find prediction of all the events that have or will happen. In Bible Code II, Drosnin predicts that the 9/11 attacks were the beginning of the run-up to the Apocalypse.

As Skeptical Inquirer pointed out, Drosnin’s method will work with any book if you know what you are looking for. Applying his statistical analysis to the Bible Code II itself, the magazine discovered that it “coded” the words “big fat fraud.” Nevertheless, the Department of Defense considered the code important enough to spend several hours with Drosnin, who has also briefed Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency on his “discoveries.”

While the New York Times and skeptics like James “The Amazing” Randi dismissed this incident as another example of government incompetence, there is a very real way in which this particular incident fits into a broader perception of the motives behind the Bush administration and the neoconservative movement.

In a series of articles that have recently cropped up in publications ranging from Salon.com on the left, to Newsweek in the middle, to the American Conservative on the right, a particular view of the Bush administration has begun to coalesce, even if nobody is sure how true it is. These articles depict the Iraq campaign as a religious war based on President Bush’s commitment to a certain type of apocalyptic theology. Former President Jimmy Carter said as much in a recent New York Times editorial when he wrote that the administration’s justification for war was backed by “a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.”

Sometimes known as Christian Zionism, this particular belief holds that the Jewish people must control the Holy Land in its entirety in order to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. When this occurs, the Apocalypse will begin, bringing about the Second Coming of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. This 19th century belief found its way into America’s evangelical Christianity, the faith embraced by “born-again” George W. Bush.

In 1986, Bush gave up alcohol and dedicated his life to Jesus. Newsweek recently wrote a cover story about this event, saying, “Here was the product of elite secular education — Andover, Yale and Harvard — who, for the first time, was reading a book line by line with rapt attention. And it was ... the Bible.” Newsweek says Bush caused a stir in 1993 when he told a Jewish reporter “that only believers in Jesus go to heaven.”

Now that Bush embraced the Biblical message of the evangelical movement, he surrounded himself with thinkers who shared many of his beliefs, including chief of staff Andrew Card, a minister’s husband, and national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, a preacher’s daughter. Believing that he had been “called” to serve in higher office, Bush had pastors lay on hands to bless his campaign, and he actively sought a power base with the Christian Coalition and the large flocks of the Bible belt.

Once in office, Bush began to push for faith-based programs that would funnel money to religious charities. After 9/11, Bush prayed for guidance and declared Saddam Hussein to be evil. Then, in March, the president ordered the invasion of Iraq.

People both for and against Bush’s Iraq policy were quick to jump on the religious undertone of the war. Biblical scholar Chuck Missler went so far as to tell Christian News Service, “As we watch all of that, I think we realize that the whole structure in the Middle East is going to change. I think that’s profound for those of us who try to take a close look at the biblical prophetic text.” He considers the war the prelude to the establishment of the Antichrist’s kingdom on earth, as foretold in the Book of Revelations.

On the other extreme, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote in March, “What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.” He sees neoconservatives like Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the architects of a grand blueprint dating back years that intends to conquer Iraq and then Syria to ensure Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East. Only by doing so, the argument runs, will Jesus come back to save us all.

For writing this, Buchanan was denounced as anti-Semitic, in that age-old fallacy that confuses the recent state of Israel with the ancient and revered religion of Judaism.

But Buchanan was not the only one to hold these views. In the past month both the online magazines Salon.com and Slate.com published similar articles. Even Israeli analysts and officials concurred. The April edition of the Washington Monthly published a road map of how Bush plans to conquer and administer first Iraq and then all of the Middle East: “Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments—or, failing that, U.S. troops—rule the entire Middle East.” Then, as Jimmy Carter said, “The evangelicals believe Jesus can come back.”

Regardless of whether any of this is true, and there will be no way to confirm or deny it until long after the war is over, these ideas have taken on a life of their own. Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to defend the administration from charges that pro-Israel extremists had overrun American foreign policy during recent questioning on Capitol Hill:
“[Foreign policy] is not driven by any small cabal that is buried away somewhere that is telling President Bush or me or Vice President Cheney or Condi Rice or other members of our administration what our policies should be,” Powell said.

Surely, something must be seriously wrong with the public perception of the administration when its high-ranking officials must defend themselves before Congress against charges that foreign governments and fundamentalists are controlling it for religious reasons.

But all of this feeds into a growing perception that the war with Iraq is the first step in something larger, and it has caused many people to channel their legitimate fears of war and terrorism into less rational fears of a coming Apocalypse. Suddenly the sight of Pentagon officials studying Bible codes no longer seems very funny.

Logic and reason are the wind beneath Jay Colavito’s wings. Email him at J_Colavito@hotmail.com.