The 2003 Iraq War Did Not Take Place

Did the 2003 Iraq War take place? This question derived from Jean Baudrillard’s essay with the title ‘The Gulf War did not take place’ written in 1991 in response to the Gulf War (August 2, 1990 - February 28, 1991).

Baudrillard began his essay with a provocative statement “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. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like” (Baudrillard, 2004). This bold paragraph prompts us re-think whether the war actually occurred as what we saw, read or heard from the news and the media, however we are not supposed to consider this literary. Baudrillard’s argument was to demonstrate the war perceived by the world was not the “actual” war rather it was a media spectacle. According to Kellner, “Media Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize it's controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution." (Kellner, 2005)

In Kellner’s essay ‘September 11, Spectacles of Terror, and Media Manipulation: A Critique of Jihadist and Bush Media Politics’, he implied how media spectacles have been used by terrorists and the Bush government to promote their own agendas. Regarding the use of media by terrorists, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, ever made a statement “Democracies must find a way to starve the terrorists and hijackers of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend”. (as cited in Cottle, 2006) It is indeed true that terrorists gained publicity of the events they orchestrated through mass media with its dramatic plot of ‘hijacking, taking hostages and suicide bombing’ which has somehow become a ‘pattern’ from the Black September 1970, the Munich Olympic Games 1972 until the tragic 9/11 atrocities in 2001. The latest has created terror spectacle for worldwide audiences through the obsessively repetitive images, footages, and montages showing the airplane striking the twin towers on television also on the front page graphics of newspapers (Rodrigue, 2002). Kellner suggested media network in U.S. worked on creating the war hysteria framing while failed to provide a comprehensible report of the reasons that underlying the war. It is undoubtedly that terrorists have succeeded with their agenda in creating fear, terror and war spectacle in media.

As a response toward terrorists’ media spectacle, the Bush administration also worked on the media spectacle. It has been known that the use of war and military spectacle is part of U.S. administrations’ agenda to distract world attention from its domestic or international problems (Kellner, 2003). After the 9/11 tragedy, Bush promoted ‘the war