This paper discusses the development of the Popular Islamic Conference Organization (PICO) in Ba‘thist Iraq. The Iraqi Baath is normally assumed to have been ardently secular, at times even anti-religious. Indeed, it began as a secular party which at best saw Islam as a manifestation of Arabism, and at worst saw it as backwards and regressive. Yet, the Iraqi Ba‘th’s relationship to Islam is largely unstudied. Only now, with the recent release of documents from the Ba‘thist archives in Iraq, has a systematic study such as this even become possible. This paper thus uses those documents to depict the Ba‘thists’ shift away from their secular roots. These documents show this shift to be much more dramatic than previously thought, and thus call for a reexamination of Ba‘thist ideology in Iraq. At the center of this transformation was PICO. PICO began in 1983 as an annual conference sponsored by Iraq and Saudi Arabia to counter Iranian propaganda. The conference soon became a permanent organization which Saddam used to bolster his Islamic credentials. After the Iran-Iraq War, The Ba‘thists used PICO to attack Iraq’s rivals in the Persian Gulf, most notably its former sponsor, Saudi Arabia. The conference met annually or semiannually until the fall of the Ba‘thist regime in 2003. Throughout its existence it played an ever ever-increasing role in Iraq’s domestic and international politics. PICO’s growing prominence was central to a larger shift toward Islam in the Iraqi Ba‘th’s ideology. For example, prior to the First Gulf War, Saddam Hussein famously added the words “God is Great” to the national flag, and in the 1990s, the regime made an effort to distance itself from its secular past. In 1994, for instance, the Presidential Diwan released a memo stating that any request sent to the Diwan would have to be justified in Qura’nic (or biblical, for non-Muslims) terms. Throughout the 1990s, the Ba‘thist regime also began to support various Islamic movements throughout the region. At the same time, Saddam Hussein portrayed himself forcefully as a defender of Muslims and Islam to an extent unprecedented by a Ba‘thist leader.