Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 it has become clear that there were important social, political and economic developments in Iraq during the 1990s that were insufficiently understood by scholars and policymakers. For example, analysts knew far too little about the Sadrist movement, the changing role of tribes as the Iraqi state weakened under sanctions, and the effects of the regime's "Faith Campaign." This lack of descriptive inference contributed to post-invasion policy mistakes. This paper identifies a set of questions that, in retrospect, could (and arguably should) have been asked during the 1990s about Iraqi society and politics. The paper then examines what questions political scientists, anthropologists, and historians did ask during the 1990s and what questions they did not ask. It explores several factors that may have influenced which questions were asked and which were overlooked: disciplinary trends and priorities, the lack of access to field-sites in Iraq, resources available for studying Iraq, an over-reliance on particular Iraqi exiles for information from Iraq, and imperatives of US policy. One tentative hypothesis is that the lack of scholarly attention to important social and political developments in Iraq was partly due to political scientists' overemphasis during the 1990s on studying liberalization and purportedly nascent processes of democratization. Political scientists largely ignored seemingly stable authoritarian systems, such as Iraq, or debated the democratic bona fides of exiled opposition forces. The paper will draw lessons for scholarship on other states run by closed authoritarian systems.