This chapter argues that the global eradication of smallpox in the 1970s helped produce a key justification for the neoconservative U.S. war against Iraq in 2003. The war was partially justified by the claim that Iraq had the wherewithal to spread epidemic smallpox against an unvaccinated U.S. population. In health planning scenarios, journalism, and fiction depicting such use of smallpox as a bioweapon, visions of American Indian viral susceptibility and Islamic terrorism buttressed a militarized logic of preemptive intervention against disease, which was spectacularly performed through the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi presidency. The ability to mobilize...