WILL IRAQ FALL TO THE ISLAMIC STATE?

In Feb 2009 I wrote: “The US handed over power to a new Iraqi government at 9.26am on 28 June 2004. The Sun-Moon-Angular Uranus Grand Trine suggests to me a natural instability and fragility which is unlikely to last much beyond the departure of US troops…. There is no reason to suppose that militant Islam will not also make advances in Iraq as the US presence recedes.”

Iraq 2004

I’m not claiming particular prescience for the astrology here, because it seems a fairly commonsensical position to have taken. But all the same, this chart does seem to work quite well for the current incarnation of Iraq, reflecting events well and therefore allowing us perhaps to dig a bit deeper. It’s often hard to define THE chart for a country. There are usually several charts, describing different aspects of the  country, or periods in its history, and exact times can be hard to find.

(PS It turns out the time zone for the chart I was using was an hour out. Uranus is not in fact Angular, but the Sun-Moon-Uranus Grand Trine stands. And the source for the chart? Can't find it, but I know I noted down the exact time from the news when the event occurred.)

The recent foundation of the Islamic State Caliphate is a case in point. There are a number of conflicting accounts of when the declaration was made, and we may never know for certain. (See my recent piece on the subject.)

Islamic State Caliphate

Now here’s the spooky thing: the natal chart I use for the Caliphate and the 2014 Solar Return for Iraq each occurred on 28 June 2014 within 25 mins of each other. The planets are virtually identical by sign and degree, it’s just the Angles that are a bit apart.

Iraq Solar Return 28th June 2014

This occurred because the Iraqi SR Chart for this year happened to coincide closely with the start of Ramadan – the Muslim holy month, which also was the time that Islamic State, for reasons of religion and power, chose to found the Caliphate. Any chart for the Caliphate would be within a day or so of this one, so the overall point still stands.

It’s a bizarre coincidence. It suggests that the fates of IS and Iraq are intertwined this year – which is obvious. And it also suggests, to my mind, that it is not just a matter of enemies opposing – IS vs the Iraqi government. It is as much the rulers and people of each moving towards each other, becoming one. That is understandable for some of the Sunnis, not so much for the Kurds and majority Shias. However it works out, willingly or unwillingly, there is a curious sympathy between the 2, and a movement towards becoming one country. It’s like twins born 25 mins apart, who can be both opposites yet closely tied to each other.

And even if you don’t accept the Caliphate Chart, the Iraqi Solar Return occurred within 25 mins of the technical start of Ramadan (the first sighting of the New Moon), the holiest month of the year, strongly linking the fate of Iraq this year to Islam.

The territorial ambitions of IS?

--------------------

Ad Break: I offer skype astrology readings (£60 full reading, £40 for an update). Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk

---------------------

 What I want to do now is to analyse the Iraq Chart and look at the transits etc and see where they lead.

Iraq 2004

First of all, you can see America's hand in the current Iraq's creation: The US Sun-Jupiter at 13-4 Cancer  conjoins the Iraqi Sun-Saturn at 6-15 Cancer. There are other contacts, but that one is striking. Along with the US Saturn squaring both these planets. The expansionist (Jupiter) leadership (Sun) of the world's policeman (10th Saturn) creating a leadership (Sun) and law and order (Saturn) in Iraq.

The Grand Trine, which involves the 2 biggies, the Sun (also the chart ruler) and the Moon, is fundamental to the Iraq Chart. A preponderance of Trines isn’t necessarily what one would expect in a chart of a troubled country. But the Trine, a harmonious aspect, doesn’t mean ‘good’ so much as ‘easy’.

It has been said that Grand Trines are sometimes found in the charts of psychopaths: they expect life to be easy, and if someone gets in their way, they simply dispose of them.

Uranus is an outer planet, invisible to the naked eye and therefore beyond conscious control. He doesn’t have to mean instability, but in this case it’s a fairly obvious interpretation. The leader (Sun) and the people (the Moon)  between them won't be able to control the country. A further instability is created by Uranus squaring Venus, the ruler of the MC.

The Sun in Cancer trine Uranus reflects the divisive tribalism of the Iraqi government. It has always been tribal. Under Saddam Hussein, the minority Sunnis controlled the majority Shias. Under the present government, it has been the other way round. The Sunnis have a grievance, facilitating the invasion of the Sunni Islamic State. The Americans have been pressuring the government, which was led by Nouri Al Maliki, for a long time now to be more inclusive. But it’s not the way they think. It shows what can happen if you invade a country and try to impose your political system – ‘advanced’ liberal democracy – on a country to whom it is alien. Countries often have nasty dictators for a reason, which is that the alternative – warring tribes - is worse.

 

Uranus opposite 1^st House Jupiter suggests that the divisions are religious as well as ethnic.

Natal Mars in the 12^th square to the Moon suggests a country whose people will not easily fight for it. There have been reports of Iraqi fighters simply fleeing the advance of IS.

 

Neptune is currently passing over natal Uranus and will soon square Venus, ruler of the MC – suggesting a dissolution of the State.

The big transits that have been going on for some years are Pluto and Uranus hard-aspecting the (wide) Sun-Saturn conjunction. This will reach its conclusion in 2 years time when Pluto makes his final opposition to Saturn. Pluto opposite Sun described, amongst other things, the exclusion from power of the Sunnis and Kurds. Uranus square Sun and Saturn describes the ongoing shakiness and instability of the leadership (Nouri Al Maliki was forced to resign in August) and law and order, the basic structure of society. Pluto’s opposition to Saturn suggests the destruction of the current Iraqi system of government.

 

At the end of April there was an eclipse of the Sun at 9 Taurus, 1/2 a degree off the Iraqi North Node. Eclipses often catalyse significant events, and this occurred at a point that is suggestive of the country’s destiny. It occurred as transiting Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto created a Cardinal Grand Cross over natal Saturn. Six weeks later ISIS fighters began to take over Iraqi towns and cities.

April 2014 Eclipse over Baghdad

So will Iraq fall? The answer from the transits seems to suggest yes.

The natal chart is highly unstable. The transits now and over the next couple of years reinforce this take. The April eclipse suggests the arrival of a moment of truth in the country’s destiny.

Iraq: Progressed Chart Oct 2015

In the Progressed Chart, in 9 months time the Sun-Moon Cycle will enter the closing – or Balsamic – phase, which suggests an ending, or the beginning of the end. A year after that, the Prog Asc will change sign from proud Leo to submissive Virgo, while the Prog Moon activates the country’s North Node: we have already seen what the eclipse to that point did.

And then there are the Solar Returns. 2014,15 and 16 all have either Pluto and Uranus on an Angle, suggesting instability and destruction. 2017 does not, but it has a Mars-Jupiter-Pluto Cardinal t-square, suggestive of religious brutality.

So it’s not good news for the Iraqi people. With IS being Sunni and Iraq being mainly Shia, that will add to the brutality. It will be worse than under Saddam, because he did not insist that everyone had to be Sunni.

The US and its allies, as we know, are undertaking airstrikes, which they will probably keep up and which will slow IS down. But, as one US General said after Vietnam, if there was one thing they had learned, it was that you cannot win a war against guerrillas by bombing alone. And there seems to be no appetite for sending in ground troops. The airstrikes are as much a face-saving exercise as anything else, the western governments having to appear to be doing something to oppose IS.

I’d say from the astrology that Iraq will fall to IS in 1 to 2 years’ time.

BUSH AND BLAIR REVISITED (part II)

As Iraq splits apart, we see Tony Blair shrilly insisting that it was not caused by the 2003 invasion, contrary to what a lot of other people see as common sense. In my last piece, I had a look at Blair’s chart to try and explain this departure from reality.

Tony Blair by GWB

George W Bush, by contrast, does not seem to have said anything about Iraq as it is splitting up. A few months ago he revealed his paintings to the world. He isn’t brilliant, but who is? He has done a painting of Blair that is recognisable. He has done one of Putin in 2 halves, one of the face he shows to the world (which may just be a photo), and the other half of the man behind the mask. Bush said that when he met this closed book of a man, he could sense his soul. Much of Bush's diplomacy was based on building personal connections, and he now seems to be turning this ability to connect into paintings. In a way, he is reflecting on and digesting his experience. We don't know what this sensitive man feels now about Iraq. And it is in such contrast to Tony Blair.

While he was President, a lot of people seemed to feel that Bush wasn’t leading his own life, that he was following in his Dad’s footsteps and was swayed too much by the old men from his father’s administration that he surrounded himself with.

His chart is not a very public one. I can see ‘leader’ in Blair’s chart quite easily, but not so in Bush’s. I can see a power of expression through the Mercury-Pluto Rising in Leo, but I would see that more in an artistic context: the feelingful and imaginative 12^th House Sun in Cancer square to Neptune, and the aesthetic Moon-Jupiter in Libra.

I see what he is doing now as so much more in accord with who he is.

His Sun is not very strong in a worldly, assertive sense, being both in the 12^th House and square to Neptune and people-pleasing Moon in Libra. I’d say that caused a ‘loss’ of his identity earlier in his life (the alcoholism would have been part of that) and a vulnerability to the expectations of being the eldest scion of a wealthy political dynasty. He would have to both make money and succeed politically, and he did both in a cack-handed sort of way, through family connections.

But it was never him. That is why he has disappeared. He wouldn’t even help the Republican campaign at the last Presidential election. I think it’s an extraordinary psychological story, which may one day come out.

Putin: Bush felt he could sense the soul of this closed-book of a man

By transit, the news of his painting exhibition came out on 4^th April 2014, while Pluto was starting to station 14 minutes away from an exact opposition to Bush’s Sun: such powerful astrology says that the painting is not just the hobby of a bored ex-President, but part of a process of a profound change in which a more real person is emerging. This process will continue as Pluto goes on to square his Moon and MC in the coming years. He may even become a good painter, because the artistic element is so strong in his chart.

Bush also has natal Uranus conjunct North Node (as has Barack Obama). So he needs to break the mould if he is to feel fulfilled. The mould, I'd say, of his family background (Cancerians are very sensitive to family expectations.) Again, his re-invention of himself as an artist could be his means of doing this.

During the period of leaders with 12^th House Suns which we had in both the USA (2000-2008) and the UK (1997-2010), I wondered about it, because it is unexpected. A strength of this placement is the ability to be a mouthpiece for the collective, and Bush and Blair both had this quality strongly (and it is for the same reason that artists can speak to the collective, and why dictators fear them.)

But in a public person, the 12^th House Sun will also want to hide, being far more comfortable in quiet solitude and contemplation. You are not likely to get a leader that you feel you know. And I think this applied to all 3 of Bush, Blair and Brown.

With Bush, as I said, there was always the feeling that he was living out someone else’s expectations. With Blair (whose paternal grandparents were both actors, and who married into an acting family), there was a wall of rhetoric with enormous public appeal that won him 2 landslide elections. But who was the man, what did he really stand for? None of us really knew who this arch people-pleaser was. Until enantiodroma occurred, the phenomenon of turning from one psychological extreme to another. When the prospect of war with Iraq came about in 2002, he quickly turned from cautious people-pleaser into doing what he believed in, with religion as a back-up, regardless of what others thought. And with a big dose of 12^th House self-deception thrown in.

Gordon Brown having just lost the General Election

Bush and Blair both had a persona they could project, while Gordon Brown did not even have that. Prime Minister for 3 unhappy years, he began his premiership with a telling image, speaking from a podium with half his face hidden behind a recorder. Most of Brown’s personal planets are in the 12^th House, but he also has Moon in Leo in the 4^th conjunct Pluto: that is the hunger for power that was always snapping at Blair’s heels, even though his personality was unsuited to leadership. Lacking, like Bush, planets at the top of the chart, he has gone happily into anonymity since losing office.

BUSH AND BLAIR REVISITED (Part I)

Iraq was always a divided country, artificially created by the French and British, with a Shia majority and Sunni and Kurd minorities. And sometimes countries like this have nasty dictators because that is the only way there will be any stability. Afghanistan is also a case in point.

So when the US and the UK invaded Iraq in 2003, there was always going to be a problem of sectarian strife which, it turned out, the aggressors had no plan to deal with. And the consequences of this are what we are seeing now, the Americans having left, as the country splits apart. The Sunnis have a real grievance, in that the Shia government is excluding them from any say in the country. A lot of them are also jihadists intent on Sharia Law, a fundamentalist strand that was fanned by the 2003 invasion.

All this is, in a way, common knowledge and common sense. But not to Tony Blair, who leaped to the defence of the 2003 invasion when Iraqi cities began falling to the Sunnis. The reason this is happening, he said, is because the West has not been sufficiently assertive in combatting the jihadists in Syria: they have gained strength and are now spilling over into Iraq.

He kind of has a point about Syria, except the West began by supporting the rebellion against the dictator Assad (the West regularly changes its mind about dictators), but then found the situation to be more complex when the Islamists got involved. And the West had lost most of the political capital that enables intervention precisely through its botched invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, under Saddam Hussein, any invaders would have had short shrift: there was stability of a kind.

But it’s not really worth arguing with Tony Blair. As I said, it is common sense. Moreover, I’m not very interested in politics, except inasmuch as it shines a light on human nature and character. And in the case of Mr Blair, we seem to have someone who has lost touch with reality. He has his political actions to defend, and like any politician he wants to defend them, but history is so clearly proving him wrong about Iraq that the only decent thing to do seems to be to shut up, if you can’t bring yourself to admit you were wrong. You don’t see George Bush defending the invasion, that old hate-figure who seems to be showing more integrity than Blair.

Bush and Blair both have 12th House Suns, not a placement you traditionally look for in a leader, due to its private, hidden nature. For the UK, it was part of a political era, because straight after Blair we had Brown, another 12th House Sun. And I think those Suns proved problematic, and I’ll return to that.

But they don’t make you nuts. Why is Tony Blair 'unhinged' (as Boris Johnson called him), but not Bush or Brown? I look particularly to his 10th House Moon in Aquarius, a very public element to his chart that neither Bush nor Brown have. This is why the latter two have been happy to slope off quietly since leaving office – indeed, they both seem to have wanted to. But with 10th House Moon, there is a need to have a public impact and to protect your legacy, which is exactly what Blair has done.

He has not had the quiet time needed to reflect on his actions. And also with 10th House Moon, his sense of himself in a very personal way is dependent on how the world sees him, so there is the defensiveness, backed up by Mars on the Ascendant.

And I think it is the sign of the Moon, Aquarius, which brings in the ‘nutty’ element. Aquarius can be a wonderful sign, full of progressive ideas and good feeling for humanity. I’m not saying President Obama is a perfect example, but he has Aquarius Rising, and his long overdue healthcare bill for the US shows what Aquarius can do.

But it is also a fixed sign, which can find it hard to adapt to changing realities. And it gets stuck in its head with ideas about the world which are outside the conventional wisdom, and that is both Aquarius’ strength and weakness. Because being outside conventional reality can mean you are nuts just as much as it can mean you are a progressive genius. Or both.

Anders Breivik: Sun-Mars in Aquarius square to Uranus

Aquarian Anders Breivik, who  murdered over 70 people in Norway on fantastical political grounds, is a good example. 

Uranus rules Aquarius, and you can see the same kind of syndrome when Uranus makes strong challenging aspects. Julian Assange has Sun in square to Uranus, and Mars in Aquarius. While the value of his Wikileaks project will probably always be a matter for debate, if you read up on the political ideology that fuels him, there is extreme paranoia about authority and childish naivety about the ‘cure’, couched in very intellectual language. (Assange also has Moon in Scorpio, and as a child spent time in a secretive cult, so you can see a motive there!)

So Aquarians/ Uranians, partly due to their lack of feeling (Blair has no personal water in his chart), can get stuck in their heads with wild self-serving ideas about reality. Those ideas are often political/ideological, because the Aquarian’s nature is to be involved with the collective. And being a fixed sign, they can keep it up for the rest of their lives.

It doesn’t of course mean you have to be nuts if you are Aquarian, most of us aren’t, but I think there is always that tendency to look out for: ideas that do not connect to the human realities around you. Aquarius is the water bearer, which gives them strong feelings (water) that they can also be cut off from (they are in an urn rather than in you).

And Blair’s ideas about Iraq, with which he seems almost obsessed, so clearly do not connect to the realities around him.

Analysing further, Blair’s Moon is in a (wide) t-square with the Sun and Pluto. That is not an easy chart to have. There is conflict at the heart of it in the square between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, his identity, is private and reflective, and it is easily overrun by the dynamic Moon at the top of the chart, with its need to make a mark on the world and be in the public eye. Maybe that is why the man has got religion: it keeps his Sun happy, but again the Moon distorts it and persuades him that his political actions are God’s Will working through him.

And then Pluto in a challenging aspect to both Sun and Moon. Pluto in his most basic form is the pursuit of power, and that is very evident with Blair, even though he cannot see it himself. He happened to get on personally with George Bush, but the real attraction was power. That is also why he is close friends with Rupert Murdoch. If he was more conscious, this chart, through Pluto, would place a great propensity for honesty and personal transformation at the centre of his life. As it is, his life seems to be more about ‘external’ power for its own sake. Pluto can have a life or death quality, suggesting that it is more than his life is worth to admit error over Iraq.