The end of the cold war coincided with the Gulf War, which was the first major event to take place in the Middle East that provided for new dynamics of power and the beginning of an inevitable clash between different ideas in the Middle East. The US started taking a new role in the politics of the Middle East, and political leaders in the Middle East initiated attempts to galvanize their respective (and other) societies around specific identities. Sadam Hussein, for example, decided to add Allahu-Akbar (God is Great) on the Iraqi flag, with his own handwriting, in an attempt to affect Arab societies’ perceptions of his actions against Kuwait, and to show himself as a “true” defender of Islam and Jerusalem, during the height of his campaign of launching Scud missiles against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Other leaders, an in attempt to maintain and potentially strengthen their hold on power, engaged in various attempts to shape particular identities in their own societies. This phenomenon is not a new one in the Arab Middle East. The most obvious example of this is how the term “Arab Nationalism” had been used in many different ways throughout the 20th century, to fit what various political elite envisioned it to be, in concert with their own plans to continue to govern, at the expense of how the term is defined (Wataniyyah vs. Qawmiyyah). Since 1990 onwards, however, these attempts of (re)formulating particular social and political identities, were a reactions to various global and regional forces. This paper explores state policies of shaping specific politically-salient identities in their own societies, and assesses the extent to which these policies were successful.