The overlap between the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War put Iraq at the center of global history in the post-Cold War era. The idealistic and at times millenarian ideas about the evolution of History (with a capital H), warfare, and politics that accompanied this moment shaped the international community’s approach to Iraq during and after the Gulf War. This paper investigates the Ba‘thist regime’s reaction to the international community’s attempt to impose these ideas on Iraq, and in turn, how the Iraqi reaction shaped global perceptions of history, warfare, and international politics more generally. The paper is based on research with Iraq state and Ba‘th party archives as well as other material drawn from memoirs and the press. These sources offer detailed insights into both the lived experience of ordinary Iraqis and the decision-making processes of senior Iraqi officials. This paper uses these insights to connect events in Iraq with broader trends in global history. The rise of humanitarianism intersected with Iraqi suffering and attempts to forge a new world order. The almost utopian thinking that accompanied the end of the Cold War promised a world in which suffering was minimized and war was obsolescing. However, tools such as UN resolutions, sanctions, and weapons inspections, which the international community developed to build a new world order, created an acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq and a quarter century of almost continuous bloodshed. These experiences helped to discredit many of the assumptions on which the new world order was based. As such, the suffering of ordinary Iraqis during the 1990s effected the world far beyond Iraqi borders and long after the Ba‘thist regime was toppled in 2003.

In recent years much ink has been spilled to explain the ascendancy of sectarian divisions in post-2003 Iraqi state and society. Hitherto, explanations largely focus on the legacy of Ba‘thist rule, the effects of the sanctions era, the failures of US policy in post-invasion Iraq, and, albeit to a lesser extent, the advent of ethno-sectarian identity politics within Iraqi opposition circles. Regarding the latter, whereas extant scholarship largely attributes this progression to local or regional developments, such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution or the events of the 1991 March Uprisings and their aftermath, this article contextualizes this development against the backdrop of a wider, global trend observed throughout the 1990s To this end, this study demonstrates how the ascendancy of Shi‘i identity politics within Iraqi opposition circles occurred just as other political factions across the globe began making similar identity-based claims to power. Indeed, the 1990s witnessed the rise of ethnic-nationalist movements in Serbia and Croatia, the ascent of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India, as well as the “ethnification” of political movements across numerous African countries, to name just a few examples. While an all-encompassing explanation for this global trend is well beyond the scope of this paper, I nevertheless argue that the Iraqi opposition’s shift towards a Shi‘i-centric political platform was due in part to the unprecedented degree of political currency that human rights advocacy acquired in the aftermath of the New Cold War. From this vantage, the rise of ethno-sectarian identity politics within Iraqi opposition circles throughout the 1990s is viewed as an unexceptional, albeit particular, byproduct of a much broader trend underway globally over the past three decades that affected parts of the world differently. Beyond clarifying the history of a critical development that not only altered the trajectory of Iraqi diaspora politics, but the socio-political landscape of post-2003 Iraq as well, this study also makes inroads into a broader body of literature that vies to attenuate the explanatory power of primordialist arguments vis-à-vis “sectarianism” in the contemporary Middle East. Whereas this growing body of scholarship primarily refutes the “ancient hatreds” thesis by demonstrating the contingency of recent episodes of sectarian political competition and violence, this article achieves this end by highlighting the unexceptionality of the Iraqi opposition’s embrace of ethno-sectarian identity politics.

My project examines how an obscure group of Iraqi exiles succeeded in reshaping US foreign policy on Iraq towards regime change. I trace the covert and overt measures undertaken by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a transborder political opposition party led by the Iraqi exiles Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, to draw the CIA, Congress, the Pentagon, and White House into war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1991-2003. Given that American policymakers tended to dismiss the broader Iraqi opposition’s pleas for US-backed regime change as extreme and unrealistic, how did a relatively unknown group of Iraqi exiles in the INC without political legitimacy inside of Iraq build political support in the United States for their objective to overthrow Saddam Hussein? I use the case of the INC’s involvement in the American interventions in Iraq as an opportunity to understand how exiled or transborder political opposition groups without an army or state of their own interface with, influence, or otherwise coopt domestic political networks in a host country to enact policies against their home regimes. I develop a conceptual model that makes analytically visible the murky world of what I describe as the transborder-domestic nexus: the configuration of political elites and political institutions such as consultancy firms, think-tanks, and ethnic lobbies that link rebel groups, political dissidents and operatives, and even authoritarian regimes to sympathetic officials in government and obfuscate their violent agendas in palatable human rights- or civil society-based discourse. The public is accustomed to witnessing the visible output and tangible consequences of the transborder-domestic nexus: the fake “grassroots” organizations and civil society initiatives pushing for foreign intervention abroad, newspaper articles and media reports emphasizing human rights violations and regime atrocities, and, most importantly, the oversees violence it produces. My dissertation provides a window through which both scholars and the interested public can observe the backstage of the powerful and influential transborder and domestic networks that routinely shape political violence and war.

This paper will explore how the Iraqi Baʿthist regime blended diplomacy with party ideology. Saddam Hussein's regime used Baʿthist ideology as a tool for its foreign policy objectives by seeking out those who supported or voiced praise for the Iraqi system. Accordingly, the Iraqi Baʿthists hoped to translate their version of Baʿthism onto those groups or states; ideology, therefore, served as means to obtain and sustain influence. This paper will explore Iraq’s efforts to export Baʿthist ideology into East Africa, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s. In the 1980s, Iraqi officials took interest in the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict, believing that an independent Eritrea would offer Baghdad better access to the Red Sea. Seeking to co-opt influential Eritreans, the Baʿthists deployed party resources to assist various student-led rebel factions. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, the Iraqis sent military delegations to Sudan. The goal was to help the Sudanese Air Force reform its training and curriculum. Sudan supported Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and he was eager to repay the courtesy. As this paper will show, these types of missions often either backfired on the Baʿthists or resulted in embarrassing on-the-ground performances. These initiatives struggled for generally two reasons. First, the Iraqis misjudged the realities of the environment in which they sought to operate. Second, Baghdad's lack of clear guidance and well-formulated strategy forced Iraqi operatives in the field to interpret shoddy policy, forcing them to offer up dubious explanations when results did not materialize. In Eritrea, the factional nature of the conflict left the Iraqis scrambling to understand who or what exactly they were supporting; in some cases, these rebel groups used the Iraqis for monetary means only while ignoring any ideological proposals. In Sudan, Iraqi military officials quickly found the situation to be almost beyond repair. The Sudanese Air Force lacked the parts, planes, and pilots to constitute an air force. In the end, the little that was achieved in Sudan was attributed to Baʿthist ideology. The struggles in Eritrea were blamed on the students' lack of ideological vigor. In this sense, Baʿthist ideology simultaneously exonerated Iraqi foreign policy when it failed and proved its merits when it succeeded. This paper will use Iraqi documents held in the Hizb al-Baʿth records and Conflict Records Research Center repository. It will provide further insight into the complexities and challenges of Iraqi foreign policy under the Baʿthist regime.

In summer 2001, Saddam Hussein ordered the Baʿth regime’s security services to identify all Jews remaining in Iraq, along with those born Jewish who converted to Islam and Christianity. The National Security Council, in conjunction with the Presidential Diwan, formed a committee with representatives from the Baʿth Party and all of the major security services in order to coordinate the nation-wide effort. The subsequent investigation documented 39 Jews, 36 of whom lived in Baghdad. The other three lived in Basra, Wasit, and Dohuk. The final report also identified nearly 220 individuals who were born Jewish but converted to Islam, along with three converts to Christianity. Most concerning for the regime were the roughly 140 converts living in northern Iraq, de facto independent since the end of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. The security services reported that converts were “apostatizing” from Islam and reverting to Judaism. Furthermore, some were traveling between northern Iraq and Israel. The situation highlighted the regime’s loss of control over northern Iraq, security concerns with Iraq’s Kurdish rebel groups and Iranian ties, along with longstanding Baʿthist suspicion toward Israeli convert intervention and Zionist conspiracies in Iraq. The fact that the converts in question were Kurds only added to the regime’s fear and paranoia. This paper uses the aforementioned episode and the detailed documentation produced by it as the point of departure in studying the last members of Iraq’s historic Jewish community, a topic that received little attention beyond the 1970s and resurfaced briefly in the context of the 2003 War. Despite Iraqi Jews comprising a quarter of Baghdad’s population only half a century earlier, the majority of whom then fled due to persecution between the early 1950s and early 1970s, the Baʿth regime continued to be concerned with Iraq’s 39 remaining Jews and 220 converts from Judaism at the turn of the millennium. In addition to the Baʿth’s internal records captured as a result of the 2003 Iraq War, this paper draws on news articles, documentaries, British government documents, United States government documents—some officially declassified and others obtained by Wikileaks—and memoirs by Iraqi Jews. It will shed light on one of the final chapters in the history of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. The paper draws on a number of collections of Baʿth regime documents, although it will be the first work to extensively utilize the Iraq Memory Foundation’s Jewish Presence in Iraq Dataset.