As I was thinking about how to introduce this episode, I was standing in line at the grocery store and saw an intriguing LIFE magazine. I quickly opened it to see if Abraham’s hometown in Iraq made the list as “one of the holiest places on earth.”

While in biblical Iraq, I kept having experiences that sometimes caused me to laugh out loud as I met people, visited places, and saw things that simply cracked me up. One such encounter happened after I had finished my visit to Ur.

After getting a glimpse into the conflict between Saddam Hussein and the Shiite Muslims in the marshland, I realized that it was a microcosm of a macro mess that had morphed throughout the Middle East.

In 1991, the United States led coalition forces from dozens of countries against Iraq in a 43-day war that changed the Middle East and the world. After the U.S. accomplished its mission, President George Bush Senior encouraged the people of Iraq to take things into their own hands and overthrow Saddam Hussein.