The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
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: pp 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).
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