“When one hears of state planning in the Soviet Union one usually thinks of factories, steel plants, large grain farms and cotton plantations, tractors and other accessories of industrialization,” wrote the American historian and journalist, William Henry Chamberlin, in 1932. “What is perhaps not generally realized is that man himself is the first and most important objective of Soviet planning.” In Germany too, Timothy S. Brown explained that “The [National Socialist] revolution was not to be socioeconomic but cultural, biological, and above all racial.” As Chamberlin noted, culture shapes man’s environment because it affects how humans see the world and act purposefully within it. Controlling culture thus helps a totalitarian ruler control his citizens’ behavior and elicit consent for his rule without the resort to violence. By laying the foundational principles and norms on which society operates, a carefully controlled program of cultural production and engineering prepares the groundwork for the long-term maintenance of totalitarian government. Newly unearthed internal Baʿth Party documents show that Saddam Hussein’s regime also relied heavily on ideological propaganda and indoctrination to shape Iraqis’ worldviews. In party reports, Baʿthist authors speak explicitly about “a strategic campaign to frame (taʾṭīr) society and Baʿthize (tabʿīth) it by instilling the values of the party and its principles in the masses of the people…” The Baʿth referred to this campaign under the general rubric of “culturalization” (tathqīf), a term that Baʿthist authors frequently paired and interchanged with “indoctrination” (tawʿīyya). Like the Soviets and Nazis, the Baʿth theorized that by subjecting Iraqis to constant propaganda and indoctrination in the media, popular culture, and in school—-and by forcing them to consistently engage in individual and collective rites where they had to express their allegiance to Hussein and the Baʿth-—the population would “absorb” (ʾistīʿāb) Baʿthist principles, and the Baʿthist ethos would become an organic part of the Iraqi soul. To aid this process, Hussein and the Baʿth appropriated and manipulated established myths, customs, norms, values, and vocabularies from Iraq’s religious, tribal, ethnic, and local cultures. If they could harness the tendencies to think, feel, believe, and act in the particular ways that any cultural environment imparts to the individuals immersed in it, Hussein and the Baʿth hoped that Iraqis would support their regime out of their citizens’ own motivations instead of through coercion or oppression.

This paper will rely on the internal record of Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘thist regime to explore the role that war played in its entrenchment in Iraq. The paper will discuss the responses of the regime to specific challenges that it faced during the Iran-Iraq War and then the 1990-1 Gulf War. These responses ballooned into much broader policies and eventually had considerable effects on state-society relations. The paper will examine two cases – one Shi‘i and one Sunni. The first case focuses on the transformation of the regime’s response to Shi‘i insurgencies in the early 1980s into a broader policy of building both Sunni and Shi‘i religious institutions – including the Saddam University for Islamic Studies. The second case discusses the regime’s response to what it perceived to be the threat of Wahhabism that emerged in conjunction with the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1. The regime’s response to its perception of this specific threat resulted in a much broader program of organized surveillance over all Sunni and Shi‘i religious institutions in the country. In both of these instances, a Ba‘thist ideology that downplayed sectarian divisions transformed the regime’s perceptions of threats emanating from specific communities into broader policies effecting the entire country. In investigating this process, this paper will shed new light on the role that war played in a non-democratic, post-colonial regime’s penetration of previously independent social institutions.

Iraqi-Sudanese relations provide an interesting case study for examining the effects of Saddam Hussein’s al-hamla al-Imaniyya (“faith campaign”) in Iraq’s foreign relations. This paper argues that irrespective of the sincerity of the Iraqi Ba’th regime’s shift toward greater religiosity starting in the mid-1980s, which culminated in the Islamization program during the 1990s, the shift resulted in distinct consequences in Iraq’s foreign affairs, in addition to the more apparent domestic policies. Close relations with Sudan were an important strategic asset for the Iraqi Ba’th regime of Saddam Hussein between 1979 and 2003. This relationship was transformed due to Iraq’s international isolation under UN sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War, yet remained a crucial link in the regime’s foreign policy until its end. Shortly after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood Leader Hassan al-Turabi urged Saddam Hussein to publicly embrace Islam in a private meeting between the two leaders. When Saddam subsequently launched his “faith campaign,” the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and several Sudanese factions enthusiastically embraced the shift and in so doing became important allies of the regime. The paper suggests that the most overt consequence in foreign affairs was the presence of Sudanese and other foreign volunteers in the ranks of the regime’s most committed defenders as they faced the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Claims of Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation with al-Qaeda and Iran were crucial to the Clinton administration’s justification for its 1998 missile strike against a Sudanese factory alleged to have been producing biological weapons, yet the sources examined in this paper present a different, albeit complex picture. Drawing on captured Iraqi records in the form of written documents and audio recordings held at the National Defense University’s Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, along with U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, this paper concludes that the Iraqi-Sudanese relationship did not contain the degree of overt military cooperation U.S. government and intelligence officials believed at the time, yet in other respects, was more complex and consequential than they realized. The research presented in this paper in turn poses many questions about the evolution of Iraq’s foreign relations more broadly, the nature of cooperation between states under international isolation, and the impact of sanctions in terms of moving official bilateral relations underground with the increased reliance on forming alliances with semi-state and non-state actors.

This paper re-examines the Iraqi state’s use of chemical weapons against its Kurdish population during the Anfal campaign and the attack on Halabja by situating it within the Ba’athist governance of subversive populations. While the military aspects of this campaign and its horrific human rights toll have been examined, recently released documents record the deliberative process of how Iraq’s Ba’athist elite rationalized and justified the use of these weapons against its own citizens. The minutes of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) meetings provide evidence of how Iraq’s political elites perceived the tactical and strategic threat posed by a Kurdish rebellion during the Iran-Iraq War. Nevertheless, while concluding that the Kurdish rebellion posed a threat, what emerged before and after the chemical weapons attack was a need among Iraq’s political elites to reconfigure Kurdish identity and the Iraqi body politic. The order to use these weapons were not a simple set of military commands given by Saddam Hussein, but the RCC minutes indicate that this order had to have the appearance of a collective decision, where Ba’athist elites conceptualized their actions as a secular ex-communication of the treasonous Kurds from Iraq. As a result of the KDP and PUK’s collaboration with Iran, the entire Kurdish population could be now be victims, because the Ba’athist elite had deprived the Iraqi Kurds of their Iraqiness. The ramifications of such a study are two-fold. The deliberative prelude to Anfal and Halabja is significant given that it set a precedent and established a framework to develop a similar justification and rhetorical process to rationalize the blanket punishment of Iraq’s northern and southern populations during the 1991 Intifada. Second, given that the Halabja attack was invoked in public discourse in the aftermath of the Ghouta attacks of August 2013 during the Syrian civil war, examining the use of chemical weapons in Iraq sheds light on their military value in a conflict between state and society.