WHAT HISTORY TELLS

The author is professor of politics at East China Normal University in Shanghai

In 1991, during the first Gulf War, French critical theorist Jean Baudrillard published a series of controversial essays later collected and published in English as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). While many found the essays frustrating, his arguments were three-fold.

First, this was not really a war—this was a massacre masquerading as war. Second, the U.S. so effectively controlled the images and narratives of the war in real time that viewers were hostage to Washington’s propaganda, which diverged significantly from reality. Third, the American version of the war nonetheless became “history,” as a counterfactual account of American righteousness, superiority and victory.

America’s “victory” in the Gulf War is important because it took place as the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was ending,