When you stop to think of the highest-rating US-made entertainment-media franchises of the post-Cold War world, you should forget Hollywood blockbusters like Jurassic Park and recall instead those pioneering products of ‘found-footage’ material, the First Gulf War against Iraq of 1991 and its action-packed 2003 sequel, the one with the deeply unhappy ending. Readers may perhaps be labouring under the error that these were actually real-life events, but this is not so. More media-literate types know for certain that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place because this is the title of a celebrated 1991 book-length essay by the chin-stroking French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who, contrary to appearances, did accept the conflict physically occurred somewhere far-away amid Iraq’s desert sands, but that, to the average Westerner sitting at home watching it on TV, it may as well not have done. Viewed from afar, with computer-guided precision-bombs eliminating targets from miles above in the sky, and with virtually no Allied casualties, the 1991 conflict in particular was more like viewing demo footage of a videogame than anything else.
So sanitised was the clash that Baudrillard mocked it as “the bellicose equivalent of safe sex: make love like war with a condom!” The war’s build-up seemed unreal, a mere geopolitical simulacrum staged as a giant kinetic advert for competing world-views. America wished to promote its vision of a post-Soviet ‘New World Order’ in which its way of life exercised complete hegemony worldwide. Iraq’s brutal secularist dictator Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, laughably got to sell himself to the Arab world as the Defender of Islam, mostly by firing Scuds at Jews in Israel. Violence thus became “a consumable substance”, in which “the media promotes the war, and the war promotes the media”, with opposing talking-head pundits subjectively analysing it like a football match. So, asked Baudrillard: “Whom to believe? There is nothing to believe,” only a series of competing narratives in which bomb-sites became either chemical-weapons depots or baby-milk factories depending on which side you asked, with the conflict becoming one of warring ideas, not physical battles. The Iraqi and Allied armies barely faced one another directly, and many buildings bombed were just decoys, empty magnets for USAF and RAF bombs. That many planes were stealth-bombers, and thus effectively invisible, only added to the uncanny effect – like UFOs, they don’t show up on radar – while the toy soldiers who never actually died meant that had Western troops just stayed at home, statistically speaking, three times as many would have perished in traffic accidents. This was a strange new kind of non-war, one that a nation
