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Did It OR Did It Not? . . .
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a book by Jean Baudrillard, is a collection of three essays published in Libération and the Guardian between January and March 1991. Contrary to the provocative title, the author believes that the events and violence of the Gulf War actually took place, whereas the issue is one of interpretation: were the events that took place comparable to how they were presented, and could these events be called a war? The title is a reference to the play The Trojan war will not take place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).
The essays in Libération and the Guardian were published before, during and after the Gulf War and they were titled accordingly: During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". A book collecting the original articles in French was published in 1991. The English translation was published in early 1995.`
Baudrillard argues that the style of warfare used in the Gulf War was so far removed from previous standards of warfare that it existed more as images on RADAR and TV screens than as actual hand-to-hand combat, that most of the decisions in the war were based on perceived intelligence coming from maps, images, and news, than from actual seen-with-the-eye intelligence (Baudrillard 2001, 29-30).
Most provocatively, Baudrillard argues that the startlingly one-sided nature of the conflict (fewer US soldiers were killed in this 'war' than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home) means that it should not be seen as a war, simply because the US-led coalition chose not to engage with the Iraqi army or to take the kind of risks that constitute war (Baudrillard 1995, 69). The US-led coalition was fighting a virtual war while the Iraqis tried to fight a traditional one - the two could not entirely meet (Baudrillard 1995, 69). A great deal of violence took place, but the Gulf War did not; rather than belittling the effects of this violence, this means that the Gulf War should be seen not as a war but as "an atrocity masquerading as war" (Merrin 1994, 447).
One of the points that Baudrillard tries to make with this book is that what's considered real is now simply images of what is real: we see "a masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image, the image of an unintelligible distress" (Baudrillard 2001, 40). This is a challenge to the tendency of many people to absolutely believe what they see on their screens. This point also works in with another of Baudrillard's claims that the war was so heavily edited when it was shown on television that what Americans saw wasn't even close to the real war. He arrived at this conclusion after talking with many soldiers about what really happened on the ground.
All this finally comes back to the title of the book, which we now see as his claim that, despite the massive bloodshed in the Gulf in 1991, no war took place there. That the 'Gulf War' did not take place is an important and controversial point to make. Critique of this idea takes into account that if it was not a war, it was a situation of violence, and people were killed and wounded during its course of events, regardless of those events' names.
