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The 2003 Iraq War Did Not Take Place

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Media and Socio-Cultural Change

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

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