Reflections on the reality of the Iraq wars: the demise of Baudrillard's search for truth?

With a military campaign designed to "shock and awe", on the 20th March, 2003, soldiers from the United States, Britain and Australia launched a war of "pre-emption" against the regime of Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Like the first Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq facilitated a monumental media spectacle, a socio-cultural drama imbued with decontextualised images, mythic narratives and government 'spin'. Audiences and circulation figures soared while left and right ideologies battled within the media, as politicians sought a fundamental goal of government, the manufacture of consent. This paper explores the causal relationship between knowledge of an event, its actual 'reality', and the reality generated by the news media. It grapples with epistemological questions regarding understanding war in an age where media images shape both our understandings of each other and the world beyond immediate experience. Such questions necessitate a return to the postulations of the controversial, former sociologist, the late Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), whose writings on the Gulf War made him something of an international academic celebrity. Ultimately, this paper seeks to assess Baudrillard's contribution to understanding the Iraq Wars, reflecting on some of his most important work. Welcome back to "the desert of the real"?