If its fictitious you could and I'm not saying you have to do it, but maybe your Saddam and your going to invade Kuwait or something when the Americans or Russians or some other force maybe another middle eastern force takes it for oil or just for kicks whatever...
You play through in Saddam's army and such doing missions, air, ground, spec ops, navy, anything else.
This way you have two forces that may be not the best equipped but not as bad as the res in OFP but you still have to be somewhat careful in your resources. Like your job is to clear a camp then destroy the arty. If you fail to kill the arty then a tank assault later may suffer if the tank depot was hit. Something along those lines.