December 2007: The day after Christmas, Iranian officials announce that the Putin government has agreed to sell Iran a high-tech new antiaircraft missile defense system. According to news reports, “the S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense system is capable of shooting down aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missile warheads at ranges of over 90 miles and at altitudes of about 90,000 feet” and “Russian military officials boast that its capabilities outstrip the U.S. Patriot missile system.”397
February 2008: Putin threatens to target Ukraine with Russian missiles armed with nuclear warheads if the democratic former Soviet republic proceeds with joining NATO and allows Western missile defense batteries to be positioned on Ukrainian territory. Said Putin in a Kremlin press conference: “It is horrible to say and even horrible to think that, in response to the deployment of such facilities in Ukrainian territory, which cannot theoretically be ruled out, Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine. Imagine this just for a second.”398
April 2008: Putin becomes the first Russian leader in history to visit the north African country of Libya, an Ezekiel 38 country, creating a strategic alliance, signing numerous agreements, and negotiating a multibillion-dollar arms deal with this enormous historic enemy of Israel. The Russian president met with Libyan leader Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi, who described the visit as “historic, strategic, and very important.”399
PUTIN VISITS TEHRAN AS AHMADINEJAD DISCUSSES THE END OF THE WORLD
On October 16, 2007, Vladimir Putin made history by becoming the first Russian leader to visit Iran for the purposes of forging an alliance with the Islamic republic and her neighbors, an alliance emerging for the first time in the 2,500 years since Ezekiel wrote down the prophecy given to him by God.
Why did Putin do it? And why at this particular moment in history?
The last leader from the Kremlin to visit Iran at all was Joseph Stalin in 1943. But he went to hold meetings with U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in a neighboring country the Soviet Union partially occupied at the time. Stalin did not go to meet specifically with the leaders of Iran. He certainly did not go to forge an alliance.
Putin’s trip was by no means conclusive proof of Gog getting his alliances ready to attack Israel one day. But it was another example of a move made by Putin that turned heads and raised eyebrows because it was so provocative against Israel and Western powers and so consistent with biblical prophecy. What did Putin do the moment he arrived in Tehran, for example? He began threatening Israel, the U.S., and every other country even remotely considering taking military action to stop Iran’s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons.
“Vladimir Putin issued a veiled warning Tuesday against any attack on Iran as he began the first visit by a Kremlin leader to Tehran in six decades—a mission reflecting Russian-Iranian efforts to curb U.S. influence,” reported the Associated Press. “He also suggested Moscow and Tehran should have a veto on Western plans for new pipelines to carry oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea, using routes that would bypass Russian soil and break the Kremlin’s monopoly on energy deliveries from the region. Putin came to Tehran for a summit of the five nations bordering the Caspian, but his visit was aimed more at strengthening efforts to blunt U.S. economic and military ties in the area.”400
If the historic and dramatic Putin trip to Iran was not evocative enough of a biblical end times scenario, the next day President Bush delivered his own apocalyptic remarks back in Washington. During a press briefing at the White House, the president was asked about Putin’s visit with Ahmadinejad and the threat posed by this emerging Russian-Iranian nuclear alliance.
The president could have ducked the question or answered in vague generalities. Instead, he told reporters, “I believe that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from [having] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”401
Plenty of skeptics disagree, to be sure. But President Bush made it crystal clear that day just how high he believed the stakes are, and I for one agreed with him.
As the president was speaking to reporters at the White House the morning of October 17, I actually had the privilege of speaking to a group of more than one hundred military leaders at the Pentagon at an event that had been on the schedule for several months, long before Putin’s travel plans to Iran were known. The event was off the record, and thus I am not at liberty to share who was in the meeting or to quote any of the participants in the room. I can say that the title of the talk was “How Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Eschatology Is Driving Iranian Foreign Policy: An Evangelical Christian Perspective.” The next day, I delivered the same talk to an off-the-record meeting of members of Congress on Capitol Hill. In both meetings, I shared an executive summary of the material in this book, discussed the potential significance of the prophecies found in Ezekiel 38–39 in light of unprecedented trend lines vis-à-vis Russia and Iran, and answered the many questions that such a discussion necessarily provokes.
I urged those military and political leaders I spoke with to consider that Mr. Putin may not simply be rattling a saber in hopes of gaining political advantage with the U.S. or our European allies. He might, in fact, be preparing Russia for a major military move in the Middle East sometime in the not-too-distant future. At the same time, I urged these leaders to examine more closely the dangerous religious beliefs of Ahmadinejad and his allies and to track very carefully Ahmadinejad’s actions as well as his speeches in the weeks and months ahead.
In the summer of 2005, for example, the newly elected Ahmadinejad told followers the end of the world was just two or three years away and that the way to hasten the coming of the Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam was to annihilate Israel and the United States.402 By the summer of 2007, two years into his cryptic but apocalyptic countdown, Ahmadinejad was telling the Muslim world that the return of the Mahdi was “imminent.”
In an address to the “International Seminar on the Doctrine of Mahdism” in Tehran in August of that year, Ahmadinejad warned that the West’s day was almost finished and that the preparations for the Twelfth Imam “will soon be complete.” Consider these excepts from Ahmadinejad’s speech, translated from Farsi by the Middle East Media Research Institute:
The current situation in the world has led the nations to reject in disgust the rule of the oppressors. Now is the time to invite people to accept the rule of the righteous, and [especially that] of the most righteous of [rulers]—the Hidden Imam. . . . The oppressors and tyrants are responsible for all the difficulties and problems currently faced by the nations, and the only way to establish justice is through popular uprising and determined resistance in the face of these oppressors. . . . [The day] of these aggressors . . . who are oppressing and controlling the nations, is now coming to an end. . . . The time of the righteous rulers will come, and the most righteous of rulers [the Hidden Imam] will form a government and thereby instate the monotheism of Abraham [throughout the world]. That day is not far away. . . . Our enemies naturally feel threatened by the call to [believe in] the Mahdi, for they do not want people to think about justice. But our reply to them is that the era of the aggressive [powers] has come to an end. We believe that it is time for the righteous to rule.403 (emphasis added)
A few days later, during a speech he delivered on August 28, Ahmadinejad went a step further.
The current problems faced by the world result from [the rule] of unworthy rulers. The ultimate solution is to replace these unworthy regimes and rulers, and to establish the rule of the Hidden Imam. . . . Those who are not versed in [the doctrine of Mahdism] believe that the return [of the Hidden Imam] will occur only in a very long time, but, according to the divine promise, [his return] is imminent.404 (emphasis added)
Then came his curious addresses in September 2007 to the United Nations General Assembly and to students and faculty at Columbia University. Rather than end his remarks with a prayer that Allah would hasten the coming of the Islamic messiah as he did in his 2005 and 2006 speeches to the UN, Ahmadinejad actually began both speeches with these words: “Oh, God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those to attest to his rightfulness.”405
Why had the Iranian leader moved the prayer from the end of his remarks to the front? Was it because the month earlier he had been telling conferences in Iran that the arrival of the Mahdi was imminent?
At the time, I told the Pentagon leaders and members of Congress it was not clear to me. As of this writing, it remains unclear. Maybe a false prophet known as the Mahdi will appear in Mecca and Medina and try to perform the duties that Shia scholars say would befit the Twelfth Imam. Maybe not. The point is not whether such things are true but that Ahmadinejad and his allies in Iran—and millions more like them throughout the Islamic world—believe they are true. These beliefs are driving Ahmadinejad to seek the arms and alliances he thinks he needs to bring more chaos and carnage to the world and to create what are in his mind the ideal conditions for the Islamic messiah to arrive.406
Why would a leader like Vladimir Putin do business with such a man rather than seek to isolate him, as the U.S. and our closest allies are doing? Why would Putin sell arms to a radical leader of a historically radicalized country? Why would Putin take time out of his schedule to travel away from Russia to visit such a man? Why would he build regional military, political, and economic alliances around such a man? Are these prophetic events, or are there simpler reasons?
Putin—along with a wide variety of political leaders in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia who believe we should negotiate with or even do business with Ahmadinejad and his regime—is missing the big picture. Ahmadinejad is not operating by the norms of conventional, civilized behavior. He is actively trying to bring about the end of the world. He believes it is his mission, his divine calling. We should not expect any amount of diplomatic logic to dissuade or distract him.
The sobering conclusion we must draw is that more war is coming to the Middle East. Even setting aside a prophetic war for the moment, either the West will launch an attack to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed nightmare or some combination of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda will launch a cataclysmic war against the Jewish state, and possibly against U.S. targets and/or interests. When would such a war or series of attacks occur? No one knows for sure, but millions of innocent civilians are likely to be caught in the cross fire when it happens.
HOW SOON WILL IRAN HAVE THE BOMB?
In December 2007, a ferocious international debate erupted over just how soon Iran could go nuclear against Israel or any other country.
The debate was triggered by the release of an American document known as the “National Intelligence Estimate,” or NIE. Written in cooperation with sixteen U.S. spy agencies, the NIE suggested that the U.S. had hard evidence that Iran halted its program to develop nuclear weapons back in 2003.
“Tehran is most likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon,” but intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,” reported the International Herald Tribune, drawing upon the unclassified version.407 The article continued:
Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, the report says, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates. But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”408
The big question: was this U.S. intelligence assessment correct that Iran has given up trying to build nuclear weapons?
“Maybe,” I told audiences at the time, “and let’s hope so.” It would, after all, be wonderful to know that Iran is not the steadily, increasingly worrisome nuclear threat that U.S. and other intelligence agencies had been saying it was right up to the release of the NIE. But there is, of course, always the possibility that the U.S. assessment is wrong.
The accuracy of some of our intelligence reports in the Middle East has certainly been called into question in recent years, and rightly so. What’s more, we must always remember May 1998, when India and Pakistan conducted multiple nuclear weapons tests, stunning U.S. and Western intelligence agencies that had absolutely no idea either country was so close to getting the bomb. At the time, Senator Richard Shelby, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called this a “colossal failure” of the U.S. intelligence community, and he was right.409
God forbid we should have a similar failure with regards to Iran. A new intelligence failure concerning the current apocalyptic regime in Tehran could be cataclysmic, not merely “colossal.” After all, even if Iran did briefly halt development of nuclear weapons in 2003, much has happened since then that could have changed the calculus in Tehran.
For one thing, the United States and our allies liberated Iraq from the thuggish regime of Saddam Hussein, who was later caught, tried, convicted, and hanged. Is it possible Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program for defensive reasons after 2003, trying to prevent Iran from ever being “liberated” by the U.S. or any other country or coalition?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in June 2005, convinced it was his God-given mission to hasten the coming of the Mahdi and breathing genocidal threats against Israel and the United States as a result. Is it also possible, then, that Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program for offensive reasons after 2003, seeking to eventually annihilate Jewish and Christian infidels in hopes of setting the stage for the Islamic messiah to appear and restore order on the earth?
NIE skeptics abounded then and still do now. Numerous former U.S. diplomats, intelligence analysts, and military experts at home and abroad doubted whether the assessment of Iran’s intentions and capabilities was accurate.410 But in a rare convergence of agreement, so did the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
The Times warned that the NIE “is not an argument for anyone to let down their guard when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”411
The Journal pointed out that “as recently as 2005, the consensus estimate of our spooks was that ‘Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons’ and do so ‘despite its international obligations and international pressure.’ This was a ‘high confidence’ judgment. The new NIE says Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 ‘in response to increasing international scrutiny.’ This too is a ‘high confidence’ conclusion. One of the two conclusions is wrong, and casts considerable doubt on the entire process by which these ‘estimates’—the consensus of 16 intelligence bureaucracies—are conducted and accorded gospel status.”412
The Post, curiously as skeptical as the others, highlighted the fact that “while U.S. intelligence agencies have ‘high confidence’ that covert work on a bomb was suspended ‘for at least several years’ after 2003, there is only ‘moderate confidence’ that Tehran has not restarted the military program.” Furthermore, the Post noted—somewhat ominously, I might add—that “Iran’s massive overt investment in uranium enrichment meanwhile proceeds in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions, even though Tehran has no legitimate use for enriched uranium” and “the U.S. estimate of when Iran might produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb—sometime between late 2009 and the middle of the next decade—hasn’t changed.”413
So where does this leave u
s? Is the Iranian threat growing, or has it stalled? Should we feel safer, or just confused? Senior Israeli leaders are convinced Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium to create a nuclear bomb by 2010.414 Senior White House officials are convinced that if Iran gets the bomb, we could see a “nuclear holocaust.”415 The 2008 Republican nominee for the presidency warns that if Iran gets the bomb, “we could have Armageddon.”416
Only time will tell, but clearly the clock is ticking.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
I have said it before, but I will say it again: it remains too early to draw definitive conclusions about whether we will witness the fulfillment of Ezekiel 38–39 in our lifetime, much less in the next few years. But one thing is clear: awareness of—and curiosity about—these biblical prophecies has grown considerably and will continue to do so as long as world events consistent with these coming events continue to occur.
Epicenter—in English and in Spanish—was reviewed in or profiled by dozens of publications and Web sites around the world and featured on several hundred radio and TV shows, including CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, and an Epicenter documentary film released on DVD for the fortieth anniversary of the Six Days’ War has been shown in hundreds of churches and conferences in the U.S. and abroad.
In November 2006, Rush Limbaugh devoted an issue of his newsletter, The Limbaugh Letter (for which I used to write), to considering the themes and claims of the book. In December 2006, a leading Israeli news service ran a story with this headline:
MODERN DAY GOG AND MAGOG: SIMILARITIES BETWEEN EZEKIEL’S PROPHECIES, TODAY’S MIDEAST REALITY UNCANNY
Ynet News, December 10, 2006.
The article noted that “current world events are beginning to increasingly resemble the 2,500 year old Bible prophecy made by Ezekiel in chapters 38-39” and that “in Joel C. Rosenberg’s book . . . the author points to Ezekiel’s prophecies in chapters 36-37, which have largely come true. Rosenberg then asks the obvious question: If prophecies such as ‘the rebirth of the State of Israel, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land after centuries in exile, the re-blossoming of desolate desert land to produce abundant food, fruit and foliage, and the creation of an exceedingly great army’ materialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then why shouldn’t the next prophecies come true in our lifetime?”417
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