Not a bad trio of essays, though they do tend a bit towards repetition by the time you reach the third. In these, Baudrillard looks at the medium of television as the key interlocutor of the Gulf War; the screens by which the war reached American homes and the analysis that became the foundation of our knowledge about the upcoming/ongoing/previous conflict.

Paul Patton's introduction is a very good primer, as well. He summarizes Baundrillard's thesis as "In the past, war has always involved an antagonistic and destructive conflict between adversaries, a dual relation between warring parties. In several respects, this was not the case in the Gulf conflict." Baudrillard himself later uses the term "consensual war," referring to the spirit in which Iraq first invaded Kuwait, the acquiescence of the UN and the international community to intervention, and the willingness with which all parties plunged into the war.

There are many great turns of phrase, but few echo as loudly and obviously as what Baudrillard wrote in his first essay, "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place":

We should have been suspicious about the disappearance of the declaration of war, the disappearance of the symbolic passage to the act, which already presaged the disappearance of the end of hostilities, then of the distinction between winners and losers (the winner readily becomes the hostage of the loser: the Stockholm syndrome), than of operations themselves. Since it never began, this war is therefore interminable."

Interminable, indeed. Much of Baudrillard's writing refers to the brevity of the conflict, the speed with which the Iraqi military disintegrated, and the frustration that it wasn't a more "obvious" war, a climax denied, the coitus interruptus of conflict. He compares Hussein to a "rug salesman," facing off against an "arms salesman," whose "entire strategy rests upon de-escalation (one sets a maximal price then descends from it in stages)." When the "sales pitch" fails to land - when the United States and its allies choose to respond with force - "the salesman rolls up his rug and leaves. Thus, Saddam disappears without further ado."

And yet, at the end of the non-war, he is back in power as if the conflict had never taken place at all. And given the "Phony War"-esque nature of the next decade, leading up to round 2 of the endless invasion of Iraq, did it really? ( )