Dear Patriots, Friends, and sovereign Citizens:

"The scene covers an immense area:" writes Edgar Leoni, "Armenia is east of the Black Sea, Media southeast of Armenia and Arabia several hundred miles south of both. There was indeed a great battle of the Araxes in 1514 ...." But -- that was forty or so years before Nostradamus -- physician Michel de Nostre-dame -- could have penned the following quatrain, which is Number 31 of Century III, as follows:

On the fields of Media, of Arabia and Armenia

Two great armies will assemble thrice:

The host* near the bank of the Araxes,

They will fall in the land of the great Suleiman.

The word chosen by Nostradamus and translated as "host," was transcribed as being the Old French -- mesnie, meaning household or possibly following, but with the clear implication that it was to stand for the household host or what might be called elite troops. The central corps of an army.

Leoni points out that it is possible, by dropping the comma at the end of the third line in this quatrain, to derive the meaning from the second half as being "Near the bank of the Araxes the [household] of the great Suleiman will fall to earth." Who exactly does Saddam Hussein think that he is, if not one of the great military leaders in the history of the Arabs?

Here is a snippet defining the area associated with the Araxes:

From the Columbia Encyclopedia: (äräs´), Rus. Araks, river, c.600 mi (970 km) long, rising in the Transcaucasus Mts., NE Turkey. It flows generally east, forming parts of the Turkey-Armenia and Armenia-Iran borders, before entering Azerbaijan where it joins the Kura River at Sabirabad.

Much of its upper and middle courses are rapid and tumultuous, and its waters are used for irrigation. The Aras is the chief river of Armenia and its valley contains Armenia’s greatest concentration of people and industries.

The Aras is the Araxes of the ancients.

Then in Century II, quatrain Number 96 reads:

Burning torch will be seen in the sky at night

Near the end and beginning of the Rhone:

Famine, steel: the relief provided late,

Persia turns to invade Macedonia.

Leoni adds that the last line could also be translated as -- "Persia again invades Macedonia." That would suggest a fairly big " prize fight," if these forces that might now be considered as Persian in origin were all that numerous and well-equipped.

Leoni's commentaries indicate that neither one of these two quatrains have ever been fulfilled, and speculates that the Turks would have to be very badly weakened to allow their old rivals to transit their lands to attack the southern Balkans. It is quite possible that by Macedonia the great Nostradamus mean all of what is now Bulgaria, northern Greece including Thrace, and what was formerly a section of Yugoslavia, the actual current Macedonia.

Perhaps some one could elucidate what British and U.S. forces have been doing in Macedonia for the last year or so, since they laid a "beat down" on Slobodan Milosevic. In a different but seemingly related quatrain, Nostradamus predicts that "a swarm of marine locusts and gnats" will be "at war in the clouds" over Switzerland (or, the land of the Suevi) --

"The faults of Geneva will be laid quite bare."

Obviously there are no actual "marine" locusts. So perhaps what he means are the helicopters and drone aircraft which resemble "locusts," and "gnats." There certainly has never been a war in the clouds over Geneva, not in the century now concluding.