Postmodernity goes to war: an essay

"Why did what was formerly seen as an esoteric cultural theory go from the margins of academia to the mainstream of public debate?
If, as Kellner suggests, 'the concept of postmodern war is widespread in the media and public sphere' today (6), perhaps this is because postmodernist theory seems to describe what contemporary warfare is like.
For example, in 1991 Baudrillard described how Saddam Hussein's military strength was exaggerated: 'brandishing the threat of a chemical war, a bloody war, a world war - everyone had their say - as though it were necessary to give ourselves a fright, to maintain everyone in a state of erection for fear of seeing the flaccid member of war fall down' (7). His account of this 'futile masturbation' seems even more applicable to the talking up of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability in 2003, or the hyping of al-Qaeda. Similarly, Baudrillard's remark that 'the war ended in general boredom, or worse in the feeling of being duped. It is as though there were a virus infecting this war from the beginning which emptied it of all credibility' calls to mind the efforts to build public support for the 2003 invasion with unconvincing dossiers of 'evidence', and the seemingly endless inquires and post-mortems that followed.
Baudrillard wrote of the 1991 conflict as a 'non-war', a war that 'never began', the outcome of which was 'decided in advance': '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 second time around, the allies' 'victory' looked even more suspect. US President George W Bush's speech on 1 May 2003 announcing the 'end of major combat operations' was the nearest thing to a declaration of victory, but many took the symbolic toppling of Saddam's statue on 9 April as marking the moment when the regime fell. The fact that the image was staged in front of the media hotel, and that a year later the coalition troops admitted they were 'no longer in control' of some parts of the country, indicated that this was a victory on television only (8).
Such apt description suggests that Baudrillard's essays on the 1991 Gulf War merit closer attention. Was he on to something about the nature of contemporary war? The term 'postmodern war' is often used loosely, sometimes as little more than an acknowledgement that things are different from the past. Even in the specialist literature there tends to be an overemphasis on relatively superficial, technical changes, and analysts are often vague about why the developments they describe should be understood as 'postmodern'. Clarifying this slippery concept, however, suggests that the most important changes pointed to by postmodernism are political."