Whose God? Whose Land?

CHAPTER ONE

Darkness had arrived and London was awhirl with activity. It was December, the Christmas season was in full bloom, and people darted to and fro in the biting winter air.

In this cosmopolitan city many of its inhabitants headed for one of London's numerous bookstores. Londoners enjoy reading, and business increases appreciably during the Christmas season. Books make good gifts, and the stores are stocked with large selections from which to choose. Many shoppers stopped and curiously observed a new book with a yellow and black cover bearing the stark title, Guns, Lies and Spies.

The first thought that doubtless surfaced in many minds was a James Bond thriller. The imaginative envisioned a svelte, physically fit, always ready Sean Connery outlasting a series of ruthless villains through applying a combination of wit and force. When one read a bit longer and observed some information below the title another scenario was envisioned, a James Bond setting out of Ian Fleming's tidier fictional world in which villains are subdued and life goes on, a scenario devoid of black and white and dominated by a stifling shade of gray that permeates the globe.

Guns, Lies and Spies is about the alleged arming of Iraq with the collusion of Her Majesty's Government, MI5 (Britain's FBI) and the CIA (America's MI6). If one took the ultimate step of buying and reading the book, or to give it to a friend, relative or loved one, the unfolding account would bring the reader back to an all too familiar world that even the most literate individual can scarcely comprehend, that of the labyrinth of Middle East politics.

The book's author, Chris Cowley, had been manager of Project Babylon under Gerald Bull, who had been killed under mysterious circumstances while preparing to enter his Brussels apartment. Project Babylon involved developing and providing super guns for Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, and Cowley reeled under the ensuing events that followed the mysterious murder of his boss. He describes a Kafkaesque string of events in which he is jailed and Her Majesty's Government prepares to prosecute him for crimes relating to activities he was convinced were undertaken with the knowledge and tacit approval of that same government.

Eventually the government released Cowley, deciding not to prosecute, leaving him with a burning desire to scurry to his word processor and release his raging inner frustrations in the form of a book. Unlike the kind of book that the late Ian Fleming would construct about such subject matter, tying together nagging loose ends, Cowley's tome contains the kinds of puzzling doubts that embody the current world of international politics, particularly in that hotbed of uncertainty, the tinder box of the Middle East.

If Cowley's book, or any other similar current books on the subject of Middle East politics were to be filmed, they would instead be laden with shadowy doubt and unresolved questions, focusing on both the drama and the murky, gray world in which events unfolded. Rather than manifesting the determined resolve of a Connery and the solution of problems by fadeout, the realistic depiction would be of a Michael Caine overwhelmed by an onrushing floodtide of events and a procession of individuals representing numerous causes, some explicable, others conundrums.

Turn back the clock a little less than two years, when Britain as well as America and the other coalition nations were immersed in a triumphal glow in the aftermath of the smashing of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces in the Persian Gulf War, the response to Iraq's seizure of neighboring Kuwait known as Desert Storm. On a sunny afternoon a group of demonstrators were observed carrying signs across the street from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, not far from the statues of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, major cogs in the successful Allied victory in World War Two, much of the strategy of which was masterminded at Supreme Allied Headquarters in this legendary square.