It is no secret that George W. Bush is an evangelical Christian who takes the Bible seriously as the word of God and to a post-Christian European secularist that is going to seem very strange indeed. If that makes him a religious crackpot to Mr. Wirtes, then he must believe that anyone with a Biblical interpretation of world events is also a crackpot and that takes in a lot of people, probably at least a third of all Americans. There were many reason back in 2003 to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom and most of the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, concurred with those reasons. I do not have the time to remind the readers of all those reasons in this comment. Suffice it to say that Saddam's Iraq was a cancer on the body politic of the Middle East, a 35-year tyranny marked with support for terrorism, nuclear ambitions, military aggression aided and abetted by the Soviet Union and France and a Judeophobia that was manifested in the Baathist destruction of Baghdad's 2500-year-old Jewish community and a rabid hatred for Israel and life-long commitment to its extinction. Yep, it sounds like Gog and Magog to me too and thanks to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and the U.S. and British militaries it has been expunged.

On the other hand Jacques Chirac has a 30-year legacy of cooperation and friendship with Saddam Hussein. In 1975, as French Prime Minister under President Valery Giscard D'Estaing, Chirac visited Baghdad to negotiate the sale of the Osirak nuclear reactor, a type of reactor designed to test nuclear materials, in exchange for oil contracts and a 23 percent share of Iraqi oil for French oil companies. From all accounts, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The Israeli Air Force paid the Osirak nuclear facility a visit on June 7, 1981 and turned this marvelous piece of French technology into a rubble pile, setting Saddam's nuclear program back a decade...... a nice piece of work that saved the world from a nuclear-armed Saddam in 1991.

In the 1990s Chirac and his cronies in Paris were up to their greedy necks in the Oil for Food scandal with Kofi Annan and the corrupt U.N. bureaucracy. In case you may not remember, the Oil for Food program was set up after the 1991 Gulf War to allow Iraq to sell some of its oil on world markets to buy food to feed its population. Very little of the oil revenue went to buying wheat and corn. Most of it was channeled toward building new and grander palaces for Saddam and sons and to rebuild the Iraqi military after the 1991 debacle. The French and U.N. bureaucrats, many of them close to Chirac and Kofi Annan, received generous kickbacks and lucrative oil contracts, and that was likely the real reason France did not join the coalition of the willing forged by George Bush. Bums like Jacques Chirac are always wth us, but statesmen like George W. Bush, flawed as they may be, but still profiles in courage, only come around every so often.

A new book based on interviews with 100 current and former agents of the United States Secret Service, IN THE PRESIDENT'S SECRET SERVICE, by Washington correspondent Ronald Kessler lets us look at the men in the Oval Office from Kennedy to Obama through the eyes of the men who protected them and saw them up close every single day. The agents assigned to protect George W. Bush regarded him as a strong-willed, decisive and highly intelligent man. Pardon me, if the opinions held by these extraordinary American patriots seem more valid than that of a French crook with an envious anti-American world view and a notorious preference for murderous Arab dictators over the democratic State of Israel.

As peace comes to Iraq with an imperfect, but working democratic government, the verdict of history will almost certainly be much kinder to George W. Bush than to Jacques Chirac. Gog and Magog, however, have found a new home and it is called Iran.