Beginning in 1991, Baudrillard published a series of essays entitled The Gulf War will not take place, The Gulf War: is it really taking place and The Gulf War did not take place. The titles of the essays are shocking: of course the gulf war did take place, and of course the war had an impact on a lot of people. Baudrillard, is not questioning the historical occurrence of a war between Iraq and “the West” essentially, which culminated in Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. However, he is questioning the nature of this war which has been increasingly virtualized. The war featured unprecedented levels of media coverage and reporting from the frontlines, notably with CNN’s live coverage of the war from Baghdad. In addition, the war, in the sense of actual fighting and confrontation was virtualized because it was a war not of destruction, but of deterrence. The logic of deterrence has transformed the nature of war and has virtualized it. The Gulf War was an exercise in virtual power, “where action was taken upon the action of the others by immaterial means” (Baudrillard, 8). As such, the Gulf war was won in advance, by the West, who exercised a far larger virtual power of potential deterrence than Iraq. Baudrillard declares that we will never know what the war would’ve looked like if it had been fought.

Baudrillard’s ideas are still relevant today in different contexts, including the war in Syria. The media coverage of Aleppo, which has been my concern for the past year, reaches unprecedented levels of the virtualization of the image and of the YouTubization of what once was the TV spectacle. However, the ideas about the virtuality of the war itself are devastatingly untrue in this case. Perhaps the war in Syria stood a chance of being virtualized in 2013, when the US negotiated its intervention. A US involvement would have taken the power struggle from the plane of the real into the plane of the virtual by challenging the Syrian regime’s hegemony (visa-vis Russia, lest we forget the cold war dynamics in this war) through the logic of deterrence, not the logic of destruction. As the opposition groups to this alliance of Putin and al-Assad remain underfunded, fractioned and unbacked by larger forces, the end of the war is in their defeat. Perhaps the largest indication that this war is real, not virtual, is the drone footage of the total obliteration, destruction, and desertation of the Eastern Aleppo.

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