After more than 12 years in power, in the 1980s the Baath Party of Iraq suddenly changed the nature of its principal domestic discourse. The change involved the centrality of two discursive elements, Qadisyya Saddam and to a lesser extent shu’ubiyya. Somewhat surprisingly, this study finds oil to be a key factor in answering this question. This study argues that this shift in discourse from the previously-dominant Arab Nationalism helps explain the war that Saddam Hussein waged on his own people, specifically the Iraqi Shi‘a which make up the majority of Iraq’s population. This work finds the state in a powerful position to conduct this war as well as disseminate large amounts of propaganda, both banal and intellectual, because of oil revenues which strengthened the state. At first, the revenues broadly went to fund social programs, but as Saddam tightened his grip on power, and the oil price shocks hit, the remaining money went almost solely to fund Saddam’s repressive institutions. The campaign had the effect of impacting Shi’a inside Iraq and demonizing them, painting them as traitors who could not be trusted. The result was a multifaceted war that was an extension of the systematic violence Saddam had already visited on other sectors of the Iraqi populace. These discourses must be understood in the context of the strengthened and now authoritarian Baath Party, the Iran-Iraq War, and a larger global economic context in of oil and postcolonial late development. I argue that Qadisyya Saddam was centrally tied to oil and played a key role in the Iraqi political economy; these discursive elements, I maintain, were used by the Baath regime to legitimize the policies of biopower it carried out against the Shi’a in Iraq. I conclude that the Baathist discourses of Qadisyya Saddam and shu’ubiyya constituted a form of state racism meant to support state biopower in a manner consistent with the ideas of Michel Foucault laid out in his series of lectures called Il Faut Defendre La Societe at the College De France in 1975 and 1976.