Iraq Against the World

Samuel Helfont’s Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post–Cold War Order, published with Oxford University Press in 2023, draws on internal Iraqi government documents from Saddam Hussein’s regime to shed new light on the contentious relationships between Iraq, the US, and the UN Security Council between the Gulf War of 1990–91 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.While Helfont fills in Iraqi perspectives missing from Western-centric histories of the post–Cold War era, his larger goal is to reframe our understanding of 1990s diplomatic history. Helfont presents a convincing case for the centrality of Iraq in global politics, arguing that “Iraq became a test case for a new global order” after the collapse of the Soviet Union (9). This “New World Order” was meant to be a rules-based system to better regulate conflict between states using international law enforced by a unified UN Security Council. Helfont demonstrates that, although there were other global issues in the 1990s that threatened these new alliances between Security Council members, it was division over Iraqi sanctions that ultimately broke apart this brief period of international cooperation.By centering the diplomatic history of the 1990s on Iraq, Helfont highlights the Iraqi government’s active role in undermining Security Council cooperation. Helfont’s research reveals previously unknown Iraqi counterintelligence initiatives in both Western and Muslim-majority countries. Building on Helfont’s previous research on Saddam Hussein’s manipulation of religious organizations for political purposes (Compulsion in Religion, Oxford University Press, 2018), he details how Baʿthists used the Popular Islamic Conference to encourage Muslims around the world to oppose Iraqi sanctions (103). In another example, Helfont reveals how the Iraqi government coordinated with organizations in the US like the American-Iraqi Friendship Federation to circulate sympathetic photos of Iraqi children suffering under sanctions to sway American public opinion (87).Through presenting these and many other examples from the Baʿth Party archives, Helfont argues that overseas diplomacy was a “central feature of Iraq’s international strategies under Saddam Hussein’s regime” (ix). The meticulous records kept by Baʿthist bureaucrats suggest that even small-scale influence campaigns were a priority for the regime. In one case, the Baʿthists recorded a memo about their contact with what Helfont characterizes as “completely random groups like the National Association of Realtors and the international Senior Citizens Association” (120).Helfont’s analysis of these Iraqi counterintelligence and influence campaigns engages directly, if uneasily, with the question of whether these efforts by the Iraqi government actually worked to sway government policies about sanctions. In at least one situation, Helfont is able to make a strong case that Baʿthist efforts to win over key figures in Sweden produced real wins for the Iraqi government, including aid and sympathetic news coverage in Sweden. More often, though, Helfont candidly acknowledges that many Iraqi influence campaigns may have had only slight effects or that they were only successful when Baʿthist talking points already aligned with public opinion. With such rich archival evidence, there were opportunities to analyze them with larger questions in mind beyond their immediate success. For example, Helfont’s arguments about how influence campaigns connected to Saddam’s populist governance were intriguing and could have been further developed. However, the extensive archival research on display in Iraq Against the World is highly valuable in providing a more complete understanding of how the Iraqi government actively responded to and contested the terms of sanctions.More impactful are Helfont’s discussions of large-scale efforts by the Iraqi government to break up the unity of the Security Council by enticing French and Russian companies to violate the terms of the sanctions through bribes and promises of preferential trade deals with Iraq after the sanctions were over. Though many of these backdoor deals previously came to light through investigations into Oil-for-Food fraud, Helfont uses internal Iraqi government documents to show in more detail how and why Iraqi government insiders like Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz approached their French and Russian contacts and leveraged these business deals to break the Security Council into divided voting blocs.Helfont’s arguments are clearly laid out, and the organization of the book into tightly focused chapters helps the reader easily follow both the macro- and micro-level diplomatic developments as they played out over the course of the 1990s. While Iraq Against the World foregrounds its findings from the Iraqi Baʿth Party Archives, Helfont weaves together evidence from US government reports, records from the UN Security Council, and diplomatic memoirs to provide a holistic accounting of the diplomatic maneuverings of the Americans and other UN Security council members in response to Iraq. At times, however, Helfont’s examples of Iraqi influence campaigns would have better supported the book’s central arguments by being integrated into chronologically organized chapters, rather than being separated out into their own thematic chapters.In relying heavily on Iraqi Baʿth Party Archives to reframe our understanding of the post–Cold War era, Helfont states that he “upends the typical method of using Western archives to write histories of the Middle East” to instead draw on Iraqi records “for insights into the histories of places like Russia, Western Europe, and the United states” (7). This ambitious goal was not fully realized in that Helfont’s use of Iraqi records primarily highlights Iraqi actions, rather than offering new interpretations of US or Russian history. However, Helfont is very successful in pushing the reader to see the Iraqi government as a central actor in influencing the international diplomatic sphere, rather than just the passive object of US policies and actions. The discussion of methodology could have been further enriched by reflecting on the layers of diplomatic contestation that have shaped the Iraqi Baʿth Party archives themselves that form the basis of this book.1Overall, this clear, well-researched book offers an important retelling of the post–Cold War era, highlighting Iraq’s central role in the 1990s diplomatic efforts to establish a New World Order. By centering the Iraqi government’s actions, Helfont restores an important balance in diplomatic history by underscoring the active role the Baʿth Party played in challenging the terms of sanctions. This book will be of interest to political scientists and historians who are interested in understanding Iraqi diplomacy from the inside during this pivotal decade of world history

Cold war · Economic history · Economics · Political science · Politics · World order · Economic Sanctions and International Relations · History · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East