This paper examines the cultural context of political violence between Iraqi nationalists and communists in the Qasim era. Within months of the July 1958 Revolution, the national front coalition that dominated anti-colonial politics in the 1950s was decisively and violently polarized into competing camps of Iraqist (watani) supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and their pan-Arabist (qawmi) opponents. I contend that the transformation of political alliances in this period was integrally shaped by the cultural dynamics of the new political landscape. The poets and intellectuals of this period were not merely providing intellectual and aesthetic representations of political reality, but rather fundamentally reshaping the cultural landscape in which the new politics of violence was constructed. While most histories of the period emphasize the sectarian dimensions of the conflict between qawmi nationalists and watani communists, I argue that greater attention to issues of class and gender reveals that polarization and violence were not the logical and inevitable products of ideological rivalries. Both the strength of sectarian enmity and the gravity of qawmi/watani differences on Arab unity were far less significant in the immediate aftermath of the July 1958 Revolution than is commonly assumed, and thus the qawmi assault on the watani position did not simply emphasize the ethnic and religious diversity of the ICP as a threat to Sunni Arab interests. Instead, the conflict between the two factions played out upon a Cold War cultural battleground in which qawmi poets and intellectuals depicted the social background and alleged sexual perversions of Communists as a threat to Arab masculinity and middle class morality. In an effort to stake their own claim to the legacy of anti-colonialism and social revolution, qawmi poets and intellectuals constructed an anti-communist polemic that both highlighted foreign (Soviet) influence and the alleged hypocrisy of communist attitudes and actions toward women. Sectarianism, I argue, was the product and not the cause of this cultural discourse and anti-communist polemics. The paper is based on an extensive survey of archival documents, court transcripts, newspapers, memoirs, and poetry from the period. Poets and intellectuals whose work I analyze in this paper include ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, ʿAli al-Hilli, Kazim Jawad, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Nazik al-Malaʾikah, Hilal Naji, ʿAdnan al-Rawi, Shakir Mustafa Salim, and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.