Gulf War: The US Response, Operation Desert Storm, and Jean Baudrillard's Analysis - Essay Sample

Introduction

The Gulf War took place in the early 1990s, having been triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait at the start of that decade (Finlan, 2014). What ensued was an aggressive response by the US and its allies in a stint they called Operation Desert Storm. The War spanned five weeks and was followed by a ground assault that culminated in the seizing of Kuwait. Jean Baudrillard analyzed the Gulf War in a series of books, the most outstanding of which is The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, published in 1995. The scholar argues that the War was a mere orchestration characterized by aesthetics and cybernetics and far from the typical example of a war (Baudrillard, 1995). He acknowledges that the War occurred but finds suspicious the presentational shortcomings by the US government and media. In arguing that the Gulf War did not happen, Baudrillard states that the entire thing was a hoax based on extreme efforts of information management and distortion of facts. Baudrillard explored the relationship between what is true and false, between reality and simulation. He talks of a hyperreal: when the differences between what is true and what is false, what is real and what is a simulation disappear. Vanishing of the differences between reality and the imaginary. He makes an argument that the gulf war did not take place. This paper explains the different reasons that brought Baudrillard to argue that the gulf war did not take place but instead characterize it as an atrocity that was mistaken for a war.

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Unequally Matched Combatants

One of the major reason that Baudrillard argue that the gulf war did not occur was the different endowment and strategies that were applied by the fighting adversaries. The Americans being a major player in the war they used unconventional strategies instead of deploying combatants in the ground through its overwhelming airpower which helped them to avoid direct confrontation with the Iraqi army. In the course of the gulf war, Baudrillard maintained that the war was not really taking place which ushered him to be considered as a philosopher who practiced disreputable contempt of the truth and reality. Baudrillard main arguments revolved along the superiority and unconventional approaches that the United States used in the war as well as the argument that the war was a media spectacle and that it was being rehearsed as a war game or simulation. The violence news of the war was overwritten with a lot of electronic narrative. Besides, Baudrillard established that a non-war can be characterized as a situation where hostage negotiation and manipulation takes place without any meaningful confrontation rules adhered by the participating forces.

The military heavily censored media reportage. Baudrillard (1995) argues that the official numbers the government released quoted the casualties of the War at 100,000. However, these figures did not represent the entirety of lives lost because, besides being victims of shots and bombings, some members of the US army succumbed to hunger and disease (Baudrillard, 1995). Failing to acknowledge the reality of death not only indicates an unwillingness to admit the extent of death may hint at many more pieces of evidence of dishonesty (Garcia, 2019). Case in point, Baudrillard (1995) states that even the number of lives that were lost were largely non-factual because they did not represent the entirety of demise because not a single death reported belonged to the Allied forces. Baudrillard's opinion is that the Gulf War did not sufficiently prove to be a real one due to military meddling with the information being disseminated to the public about it.

The reality that reached the media and the broader public was highly distorted and false. Baudrillard (1995) illustrates three types of simulations that change people's minds across the entire societal spectrum: first order, second order, and third order. The first order involves the introduction of the individual to the simulation by prioritizing matters like status and wealth. The second order features the serial representation of signs on a mass scale where artificial things like maps highly resemble reality. The third order is typified by cybernetics and digitality, where the line between reality and simulation is so blurry that a keen eye may not identify the truth. According to Baudrillard (1995), these processes appear to have taken place in the media depiction of the War. Tulloch & Blood (2012) argue that video games play an instrumental role in the first and second order to which Baudrillard refers. The media, in this case the Cable News Network (CNN), did help to push this apparent faulty narrative. Due to the in-depth simulations that characterized American society at the time, Baudrillard is convinced the entire War was fabricated.

Another justification for Baudrillard's argument that the Gulf War did not take place is that the US lured Iraq to trigger it. The author claims that Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, was duped into starting the War and that the decision was nor originally his, even though he may have thought so. According to Garcia (2019), the information in the runup and course of the War was strategic and necessary for pushing a particular narrative to the public, albeit a false one. Hussein was provoked to start the War but was initially unaware. Even the amount of literature that castigates US actions of military intervention in other countries fades in comparison to that which praises such efforts as critical to democracy and global peace (Baudrillard, 1995). He points this stark reality to the prevalent doctrine that academics and other intellectuals in the US follow, which gives them a faulty representation of the truth. These tactics were employed throughout the War and the moments preceding and succeeding it. Saddam Hussein followed the readings of such intellectuals, media reports, and communications from the US to mount a war that would ultimately be pointless.

The amount and nature of weapons used in the War were the subjects of media speculation and attention. Gradually, numerous media avenues guessed that the US used chemical and biological weapons, albeit to a much lesser extent than had been in the case in Japan several decades before. Baudrillard (1995) called this media obsession as an "archaic imaginary of media hysteria." How television shows portrayed the War changed the whole narrative by media agencies and their representatives throughout the event. Cybernetics worked effectively in this regard because it bolstered already existing media reports about the events that occurred, the figures that participated in it, and the turn of events that culminated in the US declaring themselves in charge of Kuwait's resources.

Baudrillard's assertions are relevant today, in a world where contemporary digital simulations impact people's perception of reality significantly. Concepts such as media, the exchange value of goods and services, capitalism, urbanization, and ideology are the anchor to the author's notions about simulation. The media blur the line between wants and needs. At the time of the War, the media manufactured consent from the public by demonizing Saddam Hussein and his counterpart in Kuwait (Tulloch & Blood, 2012). Products and services are based on monetary value or usefulness. Capitalism, where materials are converted to finished products and sold at a markup, is also part of such simulation. Urbanization and ideology shift the focus to less important matters. In this process, the reality is based on a virtual rendition of the same (Finlan, 2014). Grasping Baudrillard's concepts are critical in understanding how global politics works and shakes the foundation of the very society in which people live. It also helps to comprehend the actual persons in charge of Baudrillard's talking points.

One of the prime arguments that leads Baudrillard to argue that the Gulf war did not occur is the promotional nature of the war through the media attention it received and the information that the leaders chose to let out. As such, the information led to significant speculation and involved the use of hostages with the aim of eliciting greater public attention. The hostage use in the gulf war according to Baudrillard was a tool of promoting speculation without any balance sheets, operations and plans that could be used to quantify what was happening as a war. The media labelled Sadam Hussein as a charismatic leader defeated or not and on the other hand the media turned it into a profit making event. The American enterprise after the war will emerge as a top selling country racking profits from the sell of arms by acquiring a technological label all thanks to the media (Baudrillard, 1995). Baudrillard was adamant to argue that the gulf war was still a virtual war despite the high buildup of global speculation for war there was a high indetermination for war. Baudrillard argues that the absence of images in the media to prove that a war was taking place was one of the reasons to make an argument that there was not war (Baudrillard, 1995). He further makes the argument that the argument that there was a high censorship of the real war images. The media promoted the war and the war promoted the media and Baudrillard argued that what the media did was to devour the human substance and also metabolize what was absorbed and perceived by the people (Baudrillard, 1995). Baudrillard presumes the soldiers and the generals as fake and the journalists biased towards creating speculation of the war that was not.

In the Borges fable the cartographers of an empire are able to produce a map of the empire that is a 1:1 representation of the empire. The map and the empire are equal in size. In such a case the difference between the map and the territory are few, the differences become even less discernable if the map is updated in real time as is the case of today's communication. A change in the territory is equal to a change in the map. After such a map has been made it is easy to mistake a change of the map to be a change of the territory. The gulf war was reported in real time achieving the status of a 1:1 map relayed in real time which blurs the difference between the real and the virtual. Baudrillard's argument that gulf war did not take place is a claim that the map changed but not the territory.

Pretending to be ill one stays in bed making others to believe his illness. In this case the difference between what is real and imaginary is always clear. However, when one simulates illness it involves production of symptoms which characterize that illness. Here the difference between reality and the imaginary gets blurred (Baudrillard, 1994). In modern warfare, such as the gulf war, there are lots of simulations. Warplanes have incorporated virtual environments. This as the case of someone simulating illness blurs the difference between the real and the imaginary making it possible to deny the occurrence of the war.

The excessive use of media in the current world has made the signs of reality to be mistaken for the reality itself. Reality can only be recognized if it is simulated by these signs (Baudrillard, 1988). In the gulf war representation of the war was done in real time by television. CNN cameras transmitted live images of reporters watching on television the progress of the war breaking the logic of the simulation (Baudrillard, 1995). When the signs that represent reality have discontinuity as seen, it is possible that the reality itself does not exist. This made Baudrillard to make the argument that the war did not take place. In the events leading to the Gulf war, Baudrillard argued that media had rehearsed all possible realities of the war. He claimed therefore the war cannot happen since the simulated war had already...