In countries where higher education has largely been a state function, conservative bureaucracies are viewed as impediments to necessary development and change. Virtually everywhere, voices are raised to demand necessary reforms yet, in spite of these apparently common challenges, it remains true that policy-related education issues are framed by and ‘spoken through’ the particularities of distinct cultures and histories. The aim of this paper is to investigate the best approach to enhance the state of higher education (HE) system in Iraq so that it can be more competitive in this new age of education globalization. This paper outlines the present state of the Iraqi HE system, emphasizing its most relevant problems. In order to define the major problems that most of Iraqi universities and institutions have been suffering during the last few years and till this moment, we will use four different images to examine these universities: as machines, as organisms, as brains, and finally as cultures. This would hopefully help us in defining some basic needs for these universities and also the expected barriers that we need to deal with when we try to achieve the required change. We also propose a double-sided strategy for addressing these problems: specifically, we consider both top-down and bottom-up approaches for rehabilitating the Iraqi HE system.