Iraq was one of 114 nations in the Non-Aligned Movement. It was far from the only member from the Arab World; indeed in the beginning Nasser’s Egypt overshadowed Iraq not only in the Arab Middle East but in the NAM as well. In most of the major literature on Iraq, Iraq’s membership hardly merits mention. There was so much turmoil and change from 1955 on, most histories of Iraq focus on the rise of the Ba’th, the 1958 Revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (another NAM member) that Iraq’s participation in the NAM gets ignored. Similarly, in studies of the NAM, Iraq is not granted a central place. And yet, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Iraqi Ba’th deliberately start to play up their membership in the NAM publishing multiple articles, books, and hosting NAM summits in 1979 and 1982. My analysis of a broad range of Iraqi publications from this period shows Iraqi participation and sponsorship of the NAM was not merely part of Iraqi foreign policy, but was intimately tied to important discursive facets in domestic discourse about development, technology, women’s rights, and education. By exploring this third-worldism, a more nuanced understanding of Ba’thist discourse emerges that places it squarely alongside other postcolonial nations, dealing with similar structural issues, rather than an exceptional totalitarian state. It therefore speaks to literatures of nation-building, development, women’s and gender studies, modern Iraqi history, and the study of authoritarian regimes while making explicit connections between domestic and international dimensions.