Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Gulf War of 1991 did not take place qua war. There were bombs, deaths, casualties; that is not what is at issue. What is at issue is the formal property war, which requires two adversaries committed to a contest of forces in which the outcome is not pre-decided. The 1991 operation was not a contest; it was the operational unfolding of a pre-decided asymmetry, conducted as a media event that produced its images, its narratives, and its closure on schedule.
To call it a war is to apply a category that integral reality has voided. The book of three essays — written before, during, and after the operation — tracked the operation's character as a non-event in real time, and the moralizing reception that demanded body-counts as the test of the title's literal truth missed what the title was saying. 9/11 is the inverse case. 9/11 was an event in the precise sense that the Gulf War was not: an act that the West's available narratives could not recuperate, that restored singularity to a condition that integral reality had progressively dissolved, and that the West has not since been able to mourn because it has not been able to symbolize. The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) is the diagnosis of 9/11 as symbolic event, and the diagnosis stands.1
The suicidal terror is the West's own image of itself returned to it, the symbolic excess that the operational system had excluded reasserting itself. To read the book as aestheticization of murder is to mistake diagnosis for celebration.234
What we have is a kind of total operationality of war in its pure form, a form that is so pure that there are neither enemies nor commitments. BH If there was a war, where are the defeated? If there are no defeated, there is no war. But aren't the Iraqi people the victims? Saying the Gulf War is no longer a war does not mean that there is no more violence, that there are no more dead, etc.The Disappearance of Culture - Uncollected Interviews, pp. 286–287
"fatal strategy" of pushing things to extremes. They. are also immediate responses to instant history TV and its first draft versions in the print. media. As such, they belong. in the series of his essays which includes.a discussion of the staged 'massacre at Timisoara, and the equally provocatively titled: response toa television link-up with Sarajevo, "No: Pity for.The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 11
Rather, it relies upon the two distinct notions of virtual war involved in deterrence and media simulation, and upon questioning whether the military opera-. tions undertaken by the Allies really constituted a war in the traditional sense. Useful criticism would engage with these notions rather than; as Norris does, attack a soft target of the. critic's own invention...The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pp. 21–22
People say to > me: but the war did take place! But then, a prophecy is not made to be > realised. The prophets generally announce what will take place, while Alterity as Fate 281 what they prophesise generally doesn't take place. As for myself, I say that 'this will not take place', and it takes place nonetheless! This is the very opposite [laughs].The Disappearance of Culture - Uncollected Interviews, p. 287
The two books are the politically most explosive in the authorship and the most often misread. The Gulf War book is treated, in the moralizing reception (Norris, the Anglophone journalism), as if it claimed nothing happened in 1991; it claims the opposite, and the title was the form the diagnosis took because no other formulation would have forced the question of what kind of operation had taken place. The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) is treated, in parts of the post-9/11 reception, as if its diagnosis of the symbolic restoration were a celebration of the act; the diagnosis is not celebration. Hammond's chapter in Fatal Theories (2008) identifies a real aporia — if 9/11 restored singularity, it must be real in some register, and yet the simulacrum thesis seemed to dissolve reality — and the resolution is that the event register and the symbolic register are both real and that integral reality has ruptured their previous unity, not that one or the other can be eliminated. The position is defended as both books were written.