Until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 Moscow was Iraq’s biggest supporter. Those ties were developed under the Bakr government and the Soviet Union in the late-1960s. Oles and Bettie Smolanky’s The USSR And Iraq, The Soviet Quest For Influence studies this relationship from the 1950s to the end of the Iran-Iraq War. They refute the common Cold War belief that the Soviets created clientist states like Iraq. Instead the two had common interests that created an alliance between them. The Smolankys argue that Baghdad was able to follow its own national interests without threatening that relationship.
