War is peace.-- Nineteen Eighty-Four
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels.
-- Henry IV, Part 2
Ordering the New World:
Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond
Simon Chesterman
Abstract
Jean Baudrillard's controversial thesis advanced during the Gulf War that it was in no sense a "real" war and his provocative claim that "the Gulf War did not take place" were lambasted at the time as exposing the political bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship.
At their most extreme, such critiques asserted an ideological complicity between anti-realist or irrationalist doctrine and "the crisis of moral and political nerve" said to be afflicting Western intellectuals.
In this article, I explore the theoretical and practical consequences of taking Baudrillard's discussion of the Gulf War qua non-event seriously.
In particular, I use his thesis as the departure point for a consideration of the presentation and representation of violence in the post-Cold War era more generally.
Crucially, I argue that Baudrillard's approach opens up a productive line of inquiry into violence, and its antagonistic and symbiotic relationship to order.
This critique has implications for the analysis of international relations, but may also open up a more productive engagement between international relations and international law.
In distinct ways, each discourse holds statism as axiomatic as the unitary locus of power and legitimacy respectively.
A critique of violence may provoke a doctrinal reassessment of the a priori equation of order and law that presently legitimates the realist presumptions of international relations and forecloses an interrogation of the theoretical bases of international law.
-- BaudrillardOvertureSince 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.
We have seen what an ultra-modern process of electrocution is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of an experimental enemy away from the field of battle with no possibility of reaction.
But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tons 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.
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