The overlap between the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War put Iraq at the center of global history in the post-Cold War era. The idealistic and at times millenarian ideas about the evolution of History (with a capital H), warfare, and politics that accompanied this moment shaped the international community’s approach to Iraq during and after the Gulf War. This paper investigates the Ba‘thist regime’s reaction to the international community’s attempt to impose these ideas on Iraq, and in turn, how the Iraqi reaction shaped global perceptions of history, warfare, and international politics more generally. The paper is based on research with Iraq state and Ba‘th party archives as well as other material drawn from memoirs and the press. These sources offer detailed insights into both the lived experience of ordinary Iraqis and the decision-making processes of senior Iraqi officials. This paper uses these insights to connect events in Iraq with broader trends in global history. The rise of humanitarianism intersected with Iraqi suffering and attempts to forge a new world order. The almost utopian thinking that accompanied the end of the Cold War promised a world in which suffering was minimized and war was obsolescing. However, tools such as UN resolutions, sanctions, and weapons inspections, which the international community developed to build a new world order, created an acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq and a quarter century of almost continuous bloodshed. These experiences helped to discredit many of the assumptions on which the new world order was based. As such, the suffering of ordinary Iraqis during the 1990s effected the world far beyond Iraqi borders and long after the Ba‘thist regime was toppled in 2003.