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tenure. The election proper might be some way off, but the want of substantial donations was insatiable. A daunting target for campaign funds had already been set at 130 million dollars by the end of the year. Kowolski’s role was crucial. He would remain in Iraq, monitoring the vast outflow of news, ready to pounce on anything that would reflect badly on the White House and, in turn, hamper the inflow of those glorious greenbacks.
    And Kowolski knew there could be no slacking. An election vehicle couldn’t run without gas. His task was to make sure there was going to be plenty in reserve. McDermott, the hero, was going to help him achieve it.
    With this in mind, his strategy was now well formulated. He would casually mention a ‘rough idea’ to a Rumsfeld aide with whom he was friendly. Ostensibly, the aide would take the credit. This was how Kowolski operated. Word of it would eventually get back to the White House.
    And the circle would be almost complete.
    *  *  *
    Kowolski waited while Rumsfeld got out of his seat, heard General McKiernan’s words: ‘Welcome back to Iraq, sir.’
    It was twenty years earlier, as President Reagan’s Middle East envoy, that the plain Mr Rumsfeld clasped Saddam in a warm embrace to signal the renewal of diplomatic relations following a sixteen-year freeze between the two countries.
    Kowolski was then a high-flying politics student at Harvard, studying the Middle East and particularly intrigued by the show of US neutrality to both sides in the ongoing Iran-Iraq war.
    Through his subsequent work at the Pentagon, however, he’dseen a stack of classified documents that revealed the true outcome of that Rumsfeld diplomatic mission.
    Although the world assumed America was non-partisan, Kowolski discovered the US was secretly supplying Iraq with military and logistical intelligence soon after the war started. Such aid continued despite Washington being aware Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran – even on his own people, the Kurds in the north of Iraq.
    Kowolski stood stiffly, watched Rumsfeld descending the aircraft’s steps for the red carpet treatment on the tarmac below. He wondered if the Defense Secretary ever reflected that some US companies supplied the ingredients for those chemical weapons.
    But what could he do to change history?
    He was never quite sure whether the discovery of such duplicity proved the turning point in his own sceptical philosophy. Or was his cynicism a gradual progression, like a leaking tap?
    That the US knew Saddam was also harbouring various Palestinian terrorist groups in Baghdad, notably the Black June and May 15 gangs, was another irrelevance at the time. ‘Political expediency,’ Kowolski bluffed whenever anyone raised the subject.
    As he left the plane, he mused that the Reagan administration’s number one priority those two decades ago differed little from the US objective now: to preserve America’s access to oil, to project its military power in the region, and to protect its local allies from internal and external threats.
    Kowolski permitted himself a wry smile at this piece of déjà vu some twenty years on. It was important, in the sordid world in which he worked, to keep a semblance of humour.
    Even if it was sardonic.

 
     
     
     
     
    4
    Gene Kowolski counted forty-one people in the room besides himself.
    Honey-coloured wooden oriental arches, set against veined marble walls, matched the tan leather chairs and sofas of the airport’s VIP suite. Secretary Rumsfeld, dressed in a navy blue blazer and grey slacks, listened intently as Brigadier Graham Binns, head of the British First Armoured Division’s Seventh Brigade, outlined the Desert Rats’ march into Basra and the extent of the resistance they had encountered.
    ‘In some cases it was hand-to-hand combat with bayonets,’ the Brigadier noted.
    Alex moved with a professional air around the seated group, concentrating on her work and trying to remain unobtrusive.