Chapter 7: Cash is King
A/N: Trying something new this week. I'll try posting slightly shorter chapters daily. See if that's something I can keep up and people enjoy.
Please rate and review! It really motivates me!
Sajda and the Raifallahs and the Talfahs are in the rearview mirror now. I exiled most of them to Paris. They've been presenting themselves weekly at the Iraqi Embassy as I demanded. They know what will happen if they don't.
It may have seemed like the Americans didnt find out about Uday and my being shot but they did of course. The CIA is the most well funded intelligence agency in the world after all. They've probably destroyed more nations than the average american can name. But the American concern was clearly about the forthcoming deal and whether it was still on the table. When they found out I had just received a shoulder wound they were quick to move onto business.
Remember Mr. Shaw, the CIA man in the 3 person negotiating team? He became my primary point of contact in mid 1979 as we approached the beginning of the actual deal. He brought me several diplomatic pouches full of the American greenback. Almost 5 million dollars which would be about 20 million in 2021 in my original timeline. Who knows how my transmigration would fuck up future inflation.
The money was to grease palms. Now 5 million dollars even in those days was a heckuva lot of money in iraq. It's not just about inflation it's also about the cost of living in iraq which is much lower than in america of course. So 5 million dollars was a significant amount of capital to work with. A chunk of it would go to my lackeys in the state and armed forces. People such as Ahmed for example who would help keep the Mukhbarat in line. It was a reminder to these people that supporting Saddam was the better option than contemplating a coup. Plata o plomo worked for Pablo Escobar and for ganglords world over because it's such a simple equation even for illiterate people to follow. On the one hand you offer to enrich the person and on the other to bodily harm them and/or their families. The risk-return profile of the deal is incredibly skewed. That's exactly why it was so hard to disentrench the mafia in italy and the cartels in Colombia. That's also why in poorer nations, corruption is rampant. People fall on a spectrum of corruption acceptability. Some people will watch the world burn for a penny while others will risk their familys lives but not budge on corruption. Most people however fall in the middle and if a gangster implements plata o plomo then a low level government employee is going to rubber stamp that fake license for sand mining in a heartbeat.
Another chunk of this cash would go to the ceo of the construction company I would hire near Basra in the south to construct the bare bones of the US army base and the road to connect it to the Basra oilfield and then to the docks. The americans would add the finishing touches to their base and would do their own thing to upgrade the Basra Port as I had agreed with them. I planned to subtly hint that the oil would move faster from the field to port by way of railways. Hopefully that would spur them onto building commercial rail lines in the south. I planned to lay commercial railroads from Kirkuk in the north through the Sunni north-central area, around Baghdad and then down south to Basra. That would eventually become the backbone of my envisioned country.
But I digress. Another chunk of the cash I hoped to use to assuage the Shia and Kurdish leadership. In the long run the funds from the US deal will benefit all Iraqis regardless of sect. But the long run could be anywhere from 3 to 10 years and in my experience humans are extremely short sighted. I cant afford for outright rebellion in the intervening period.
While the Americans will be focused on the southern part of the country, I will try and develop Kirkuk in the north including that oilfield. The Kurds would be a difficult group to tackle. Firstly because I actually admire them from my previous life, secondly because they're much more united than the Iraqi Shias and lastly because they are spread out over the mountainous regions of northern Iraq, Northern Syria and Southern Turkey. That area has never really been patrolled by any of the aforementioned nations so there's extremely porous borders so you can never really know when the reinforcements will stop. I actually didn't really want to fight the Kurds. I wanted to bring them over to my side. But the problem is even if they accept some sort of solution, how would I control them from launching attacks into Turkey and Syria in their hunt for Greater Kurdistan. If I have a deal with the Iraqi Kurds who then continue to launch attacks into my neighbours I will look like I'm harbouring terrorists. Such a headache.