This paper re-examines the Iraqi state’s use of chemical weapons against its Kurdish population during the Anfal campaign and the attack on Halabja by situating it within the Ba’athist governance of subversive populations. While the military aspects of this campaign and its horrific human rights toll have been examined, recently released documents record the deliberative process of how Iraq’s Ba’athist elite rationalized and justified the use of these weapons against its own citizens. The minutes of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) meetings provide evidence of how Iraq’s political elites perceived the tactical and strategic threat posed by a Kurdish rebellion during the Iran-Iraq War. Nevertheless, while concluding that the Kurdish rebellion posed a threat, what emerged before and after the chemical weapons attack was a need among Iraq’s political elites to reconfigure Kurdish identity and the Iraqi body politic. The order to use these weapons were not a simple set of military commands given by Saddam Hussein, but the RCC minutes indicate that this order had to have the appearance of a collective decision, where Ba’athist elites conceptualized their actions as a secular ex-communication of the treasonous Kurds from Iraq. As a result of the KDP and PUK’s collaboration with Iran, the entire Kurdish population could be now be victims, because the Ba’athist elite had deprived the Iraqi Kurds of their Iraqiness. The ramifications of such a study are two-fold. The deliberative prelude to Anfal and Halabja is significant given that it set a precedent and established a framework to develop a similar justification and rhetorical process to rationalize the blanket punishment of Iraq’s northern and southern populations during the 1991 Intifada. Second, given that the Halabja attack was invoked in public discourse in the aftermath of the Ghouta attacks of August 2013 during the Syrian civil war, examining the use of chemical weapons in Iraq sheds light on their military value in a conflict between state and society.