The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

Read for Network Imperialism and also cause reading some Jean never hurt (or, wait, yes it definitely has) anyone.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Baudrillard, Jean 1995. The Gulf War did not take place. Power Publications, Sidney.

The Gulf War will not take place

 * "From the beginning we knew this war would never happen. After the hot war (the violence of conflict), after the cold war (the balance of terror), here comes the dead war- the unfrozen cold war - which leaves us to grapple with corpse of war and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse which nobody from the Guld has managed to revive. America, Saddam Hussein and the Gulf powers are fighting over the corpse of war." (23)


 * "Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows us to pass to the act "in vitro" (this is true even of procreation). We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real." (28)

The Gulf War: is it really taking place?

 * "The war is also pure and speculative to the extent that we do not see the real even that it could be or would signify." (29)


 * "Promotional, speculative, virtual: this war no longer corresponds to Clausewitz's formula of politics pursued by other means, it rather amounts to the absence of politics pursued by other means." (30)


 * "The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick skinned parasite in our culture. " (31).


 * "WW III did not take place and yet we are already beyond it, as though in the utopian space of a post-war-which-did-not-take-place, and it is in the suspense created by this non-place that the present confrontations unfold and the question is posed: can a war still take place?" (33)


 * "Empty War: ir brings to mind those games in World Cup football which often had to be decided by penalties (sorry spectacle), because of the impossibility of forcing a decision. As those the players punished themselves by means of 'penalties' for not have been able to play and take the match in full battle. We might as well as begun with the penalties and dispense with the game and its sterile stand-off. So with the war: if could have begun at the end and spared us the forced spectacle of this unreal war..." (33)


 * "It is a war of excesses (of means, of material, etc.) a war of shedding or purging stocks, of experimental deployment, of liquidation and firesale... A war between excessive, superabundant, and over-equipped societies (Iraq included), committed both of waste (including human waste) and the necessity of getting rid of it." (33)


 * "Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war" (34).


 * "Americans can only imagine and combat an enemy in their own image. They are at once both missionaries and converts of their own way of life, which they triumphantly project onto the world. They cannot imagine the Other, nor therefore make war upon it. What they make war upon is the alterity of the other, and what they want is to reduce that alterity, to convert it, or failing that to annihilate it if it proves irreducible (the Indians)." (37)


 * "This is the rule of the American way of life: nothing personal! And they make war in the same manner: pragmatically and not symbolically." (39)


 * "The archive also belonds to virtual time; it is the completement of the event 'in real time,' of that instantaneity of the event and its diffusion." (47)


 * "Iraq is being rebuilt before it can even be destroyed. After-sales service. Such anticipation reduces even further the credibility of the war, which did not need this to discourage those who wanted to believe in it." (52)

The Gulf War did not take place

 * THE BIG QUOTE:


 * " Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. ... But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tonnes of bombs per day is sufficient to make it a war. Any more than the direct transmission by CNN of real time information is sufficient to authenticate a war." (61)


 * "Electronic war no longer has any political objective strictly speaking: it functions as a preventive electroshock against any future conflict. Just as in modern communication there no longer any interlocutor, so in this electronic war there is no longer any enemy, there is only a refractory element which must be neutralised and consensualised." (84)

Part of At Cambridge