The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
By
Matt Terry
By
Matt Terry
Military, November 27, 2008
(A theory based essay looking at the conspiracies and media cover ups involved in the gulf war and the recent Iraq war referring in detail to the work of John Baudrillard.)
September the 11th, 2001. This date needs no explanation. In fact you would be pretty hard pressed to find a single person in the western world that that date does not bare significance to. The events that took place on that day and the events that became from it have reshaped the world we live in and changed the way we live our lives to date.
‘Within hours of the apocalyptic events of September 11, headline writers, pundits and politicians were agreed on one thing: the world had changed forever’ -- The Guardian (October 11th, 2001) Has The World Changed? Available At: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/11/afghanistan Accessed on 2008-05-29)
In Baudrillards book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, he deemed that the first Gulf War as fraudulent, ‘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’ -- Baudrillard, J. (1991), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press: p. 61.
So the war was fraudulent as there was never actually a true conflict during the Gulf War as America won before the first bullet was fired. Also fraudulent refers to the fact that invading any country unprovoked directly violates the United Nations terms of war.
In the same sense as this, two fraudulent wars were started on the day of September 11th 2001.
The first being war in the literal sense, the invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces, a war fought by soldiers on a battlefield.
The second, the war that is still raging strong today, a war that is being fought not on a battlefield but within in the minds of society on a day to day basis, ‘The War On Terror’.
Forgetting for a minute the literal meaning of the word war, both of these wars to us have been presented to us in the same way and fought with the same weapon. By this I mean the weapon of propaganda.
The purpose of propaganda in a situation like this is gain public backing for the issue at hand, in this instance war. However this often comes at the cost of exaggerating, misleading and even lying about the issue to gain that support.
‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’ -- Winston Churchill (the second world war) Available at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/winston_churchill.html Accessed on 2008-05-29).
Propaganda has always been a potent tool of war, most notably when it was harnessed to its full potential by the Nazis during the World War II. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie … The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.” -- Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.
This was the first time that propaganda was ever used to this extent, the first time that it moved from merely being a form of persuasion to being a form of ‘brainwashing’ and the propaganda we are being subjected to now is no exception to this idea.
The first time that this really became apparent to us was during the first Gulf War. In respect of the media and propaganda there was something that made the first Gulf War very special and very different to any other wars of previous years. This was the fact that it was the first ever fully televised military campaign, though there had been Vietnam prior to this it was nowhere near on the same scale in terms of media coverage.
For the first time ever the public could tune in and actually watch the war being fought. ‘For the first time people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers’.GNU Free Documentation License. (June 3rd 2003) Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GulfWarMedia. (Accessed on 2008-06-09).
This mass media coverage was a huge advantage to the coalition governments as it allowed them to show their people how their war was being fought. The war was promoted as being a surgical or clean war, ‘A cost-free victory. A push-button, remote-control war won without casualties. Surgical strikes that wipe out military targets while sparing civilians’ -- Thomas. (1991) Media Coverage Of The Persian Gulf war. Available At: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/33253/media_coverage_of_the_persian_gulf.html?page=2&cat=37. (Accessed On: 2008-06-09)
The news constantly projected positive images of the war. There were various articles describing the different types of advanced technologies that were winning us the war. Things such as stealth planes, ATACMS, cruise missiles and virtual reality helmets, the news were constantly showing the public exactly how these weapons are supposed to work and what an excellent job they were doing.
“Now the Tomahawk seems to be giving new meaning to the term guided missile, with an accuracy that the CNN-addicted public has found breathtaking. Of the first 52 Tomahawks fired, the military reported 51 hit home. By the end of the war’s third week, some 300 of the $1.3 million Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired at Iraq."-- John Schwartz. (1991). Newsweek. Available At: http://www.newsweek.com/id/133595. (Accessed On: 2008-06-10 )
Unfortunately however, this was propaganda in its element and the war that we knew and were all being subjected to was not quite the war that was actually being fought. The news and the media neglected to mention the instances in which the best laid plans and so called surgical strikes went horribly wrong and innocent thousands of innocent people lost there lives.
“By now it should be clear to anyone that claims of a surgical or a precise war are no more than the kind of excuses which the guilty always give to deflect blame elsewhere. The destruction of Iraq was near total and it was criminal, The only way to describe what happened there would be a killing frenzy.” -- Paul Walker (May 11, 1991). Director of the Institute for Peace and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available At: http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-myth.htm (Accessed On: 2008-06-10)
This is what Baudrillard meant by saying ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’. He did not literally mean that there wasn’t a Gulf War, he meant that the war as we knew the war to be didn’t actually happen.
‘Fake war, deceptive war, not even the illusion but the disillusion of war, a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity’ -- Baudrillard, J. (1991). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press: p. 68.
It was an extensive propaganda campaign and a number of tactics were used to hide from us what was really happening and influence our judgment.
It was once said that the first casualty of in times of war is the truth. Propaganda techniques are employed such as decontextualizing violence, only showing us selective stories and giving us partial facts, Manichaeism, portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as ‘evil’.
Information obtained from, 7 Elements Of Cyberer’s Propaganda Strategy Exposed & Demolished. (June 5th 2008) Available At: http://www.islamonline.net/discussione/thread.jspa?messageID=135409. (Accessed On: 2008-06-10).
The Gulf War we knew was not a real war, it was a virtual war, a simulation of war, a propaganda campaign tailor made to meet the exact specifications required. Now nearly a decade on we find ourselves in the exact same situation.
We are in the midst of another virtual war, by this I mean the propaganda masterpiece known as ‘The War On Terror’.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie. It is a mega-lie, and the people have come to believe it. It is the ‘War on Terror’.
Richard. W. Behan. (September 27th, 2007). Available At: http://enigmaobscura.newsvine.com/_news/2007/09/28/990788-the-mega-lie-called-the-war-on-terror-a-masterpiece-of-propaganda (Accessed On: 2008-06-10)
The ‘War On Terror’ is part of the same campaign of propaganda we have previously been subjected to. Its existence is virtual, it is a simulation designed to influence not only our judgement but how we feel and behave toward a number of pressing current issues that are presented to us through the media.
‘Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.' -- Baudrillard, J. (1994) The Precession of Simulacra, University of Michigan Press: p. 01.
The atrocities which occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, provided certain governments with a spectacular opportunity. The western masses were confused, outraged and scared.
9/11 provided a smokescreen to hide the true intentions of certain governments and gain the support of the public.
Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the United States “… would take the fight directly to the terrorists,” and “… he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them.” Thus the “War on Terror” was born. -- Richard. W. Behan. (September 27th, 2007) Available At: http://enigmaobscura.newsvine.com/_news/2007/09/28/990788-the-mega-lie-called-the-war-on-terror-a-masterpiece-of-propaganda. (Accessed On: 2008-06-10)
The tragic events of 9/11 were the reason for the launch and the justification of the ‘War On Terror’, now it in turn is and has been used to justify a myriad of political decisions to the eyes of the public, and rally support for a number of different war agendas.
The news constantly promotes the idea of Al Qaeda and the Taliban creating villainous images of characters like Osama Bin Laden and Abu Hamza.
We are led to believe that one man, based in one of the world’s poorest countries managed to outsmart the richest, most powerful and one of the most advanced nations in the world. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of September 11.
‘When people across the US and around the World find out that Al Qaeda is not an outside enemy but a creation of US foreign policy and the CIA, the legitimacy of the bipartisan war agenda will tumble like a deck of cards’ -- Chossudovsky M. (2005) America’s “War on Terrorism,” Global Research, p. 29.
We are forever being subjected to this idea of an outside enemy, an evil force that needs to be stopped. An illusion is being created that western civilisation is constantly under threat.
The ‘War On Terror’ is simply a propaganda campaign being used to drum up an atmosphere of fear and moral panic.
This fear is then being exploited and used to legitimise the use of military action and the waging of fraudulent wars against ‘rogue countries’ and divert public attention from what is really happening. It is more of a war of terror than a war on terror.
The really sad fact is that all of this really boils down to one thing in the end, profit. Money is power, and the economical benefits of waging a war real and virtual/televised are so vastly beneficial for the government and such a large number of various industries and corporations that instigating certain agendas and prolonging them for as long as possible is actually a very positive thing to them, in spite of what they try and make us believe.
“War is unpredictable, which is why it makes for an ideal tool to get away with murder while making a profit for years afterward. The people must never take their granting permission to wage war lightly. Once war is declared the status quo or life as normal rapidly changes. All wars are manufactured and those that benefit the most from war are the ones most complicit in instigating it; the ones that sell it the strongest” -- Tribal Messenger (2003) Order of Chaos. Available At: http://www.tribalmessenger.org/war/war-on-terror.htm. (Accessed On: 2008-06-11)
As well as the benefits that are created from the point of view of manufacturing a propaganda campaign, there is also a great economical benefit to waging a televised military campaign or virtual war.
This is the pure and simple fact that it is not an actual war, it costs practically nothing. Real wars initially cost billions. The economical ramifications of waging a real war are outrageously obscene.
For the recent Iraq war, “one estimate puts the total economic impact at up to $2 trillion.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954.
Creating the illusion of war however is practically cost free. The cost of the necessary equipment required to elicit a televised war such as a T.V studio and cameras is miniscule in comparison. There is also the publicity that is given whilst broadcasting a televised war to be taken into account. For one reason or another, people are fascinated by war.
Millions of people tune in to watch developing conflicts oblivious to the fact that they are essentially buying a product, caught up in a cycle of publicity, promotion and propaganda.
“the media promote the war, the war promotes the media and advertising competes with the war” (1991: 31).
We are living in an age where we are being constantly blindsided by the media, forever caught up in a reign of deception that is used to cloud our judgments and alter our perceptions.
Feelings are manufactured and exploited. Propaganda is used to create moral panics as distractions just so governments can do as they please and hope no one will notice whatever the cost maybe, millions, billions, trillions or the greatest cost of all, the cost of humanity.
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