This paper will rely on the internal record of Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘thist regime to explore the role that war played in its entrenchment in Iraq. The paper will discuss the responses of the regime to specific challenges that it faced during the Iran-Iraq War and then the 1990-1 Gulf War. These responses ballooned into much broader policies and eventually had considerable effects on state-society relations. The paper will examine two cases – one Shi‘i and one Sunni. The first case focuses on the transformation of the regime’s response to Shi‘i insurgencies in the early 1980s into a broader policy of building both Sunni and Shi‘i religious institutions – including the Saddam University for Islamic Studies. The second case discusses the regime’s response to what it perceived to be the threat of Wahhabism that emerged in conjunction with the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1. The regime’s response to its perception of this specific threat resulted in a much broader program of organized surveillance over all Sunni and Shi‘i religious institutions in the country. In both of these instances, a Ba‘thist ideology that downplayed sectarian divisions transformed the regime’s perceptions of threats emanating from specific communities into broader policies effecting the entire country. In investigating this process, this paper will shed new light on the role that war played in a non-democratic, post-colonial regime’s penetration of previously independent social institutions.