George Bush was in little doubt about how the US-led coalition would bring down Saddam Hussein.At a prayer meeting, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he said: "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."
Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God
But God's help was being invoked in Baghdad, too. Saddam Hussein told Iraqis: "Fight as God ordered you to do."
So does that makes last year's Iraq conflict a religious war? The authors of the War Audit suggest that it was arguably a war driven by religion.
But, as they point out, the Pope and the US Catholic bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many theologians around the world argued that it fell well short of the rigorous criteria for a "just" war.
President Bush and Saddam Hussein were only the most recent of a long line of political leaders who have drawn on religion to help them in battle or to justify a military campaign.
But the War Audit set out to identify conflicts that were more closely linked to religious belief than to political causes - that could most properly be called religious wars.
And that, it concluded, means going back to the wars of Islamic expansion beginning in the 7th Century, the Crusades starting in the 11th Century and the Reformation wars beginning in the 16th Century.
Here the wars were fought primarily because of religious differences. Most are much more complex. To some extent, the nature of a war is in the eye of the beholder.