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Iraq against the World
Iraq against the World
Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order
SAMUEL HELFONT
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–753015–3
eISBN 978–0–19–753017–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530153.001.0001
To Nadav, Edden, and Tally
Contents
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
“This is not, as Saddam Hussein would have it, the United States
against Iraq. It is Iraq against the world.”1 George H. W. Bush spoke
those words before a joint session of Congress on September 11,
1990. By invoking “the world,” Bush was not referring simply to the
large number of countries he was assembling into the Gulf War
coalition. As he made clear in the speech, Bush saw the war as an
opportunity to birth “a new world order.” The Cold War was coming
to an end, and in Bush’s words, “a new world is struggling to be
born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world
where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” For its
proponents, this new world would be the culmination of a centuries-
old intellectual history rooted in utopian thinking about global peace
and universal governance. It would be embedded in institutions of
international law like the United Nations Security Council, which was
designed to contain the might-makes-right calculations that had
tortured the twentieth century.
The end of the Cold War marked a unique point in global history.
It has been called a unipolar moment, Pax Americana, and even the
“end of history.”2 One prominent analyst later described it as
launching a period of “deep peace,” fulfilling the biblical prophecy in
which “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war no more.”3 Of course, not everyone was swept away
by what one historian called the “millenarian expectations” of the
period and that dissent is critical to this book.4 Yet, whatever one
makes of post–Cold War idealism, it was clear that after a decades-
long struggle, the United States emerged as the undisputed leader
of global politics; not just a great power, or even a superpower, but a
“hyperpower.”5
Bush had an unprecedented chance to shape the new world that
he heralded in his speech to Congress, and he placed the recalcitrant
regime in Iraq at the center of his strategy to do so. Following the
Gulf War, Bush continued to rally international support for building a
new world order based on his policies toward Iraq. He touted
experimental tools such as international sanctions, weapons
inspections, and no-fly zones, which he hoped a newly unified
Security Council could use to enforce its resolutions and contain
Saddam. Many internationalists and peace activists shared Bush’s
aspirations and hoped that employing these tools would be an
important step toward ending interstate war altogether.
This was “the world” that Bush invoked, and this book unearths
the untold story of how Iraq confronted it throughout the 1990s and
early 2000s. The book relies on American, United Nations, and
British records, as well as years of research in Arabic-language Iraqi
archives. The results highlight previously unknown Iraqi strategies,
including the prominent use of influence operations and manipulative
statesmanship. In exploring these strategies, the book traces Ba‘thist
operations around the globe—from the streets of New York and
Stockholm, to the mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the
halls of power in Paris and Moscow. In doing so, it highlights the
limits of Bush’s new world order. It also offers new insight into Iraq’s
attempts to influence the evolution of post–Cold War politics, the
fallout of which continues to shape our world today.