There Is No Iran

Why the Gulf War still hasn’t started, 35 years on

On January 4, 1991—thirteen days before the bombing of Iraq began—the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published an essay in Liberation titled “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”. The headline nodded to Jean Giraudoux’s play “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place”, whose characters try to forestall the inevitable.

Once the bombing started, he followed with a second essay—“The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?”. After hostilities ended came a third: “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. These texts made up a book published in May 1991.

This piece explains why the French thinker’s idea still holds today—judging by Donald Trump’s posts and more.

On “the war that did not happen”

Baudrillard did not deny that bombs fell in the desert and people died. His point was different: what occurred was not war in the usual sense—a clash of armies able to inflict comparable damage on each other. The imbalance of military power was so great that direct confrontation never happened.

What mattered most to Baudrillard was how events in the Persian Gulf were perceived. The 1991 war became the first armed conflict in history that television broadcast live, 24 hours a day. Viewers saw strikes from missile-borne cameras but not the victims or the destruction—the American authorities, mindful of Vietnam, imposed controls on the media.

“At times the absurdity of the media’s self-representation as the purveyor of reality and immediacy broke the surface—in such moments as, for example, when CNN’s cameras switched live to a group of reporters somewhere in the Persian Gulf, only for them to admit that they were themselves sitting and watching CNN, trying to work out what was happening. Television news, it seemed, had finally caught up with the logic of simulation,” wrote Baudrillard’s translator Paul Patton in the introduction to the English edition.

What hyperreality is

Hyperreality is a situation in which the image of an event matters more than objective reality. The copy displaces the original—not because anyone is deliberately deceiving, but because that is how media work. They make the image more accessible and more vivid than reality itself.

“To the catastrophe (an occurrence) of the real world we prefer exile into the virtual world, whose universal mirror is television,” wrote Baudrillard.

The philosopher had developed this idea long before the Gulf. In “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981) he described four stages in the relation between image and reality: first the image reflects reality, then masks it, then masks the absence of it, and finally has no relation to reality at all—it becomes a pure simulacrum.

The Gulf conflict became, for Baudrillard, the perfect illustration. The television picture replaced the event itself. War turned, in his words, into an advertising campaign without a product:

“Advertising-informational, speculative, virtual: this war no longer corresponds to von Clausewitz’s well-known formula ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, but rather signifies the absence of politics, continued by other means.”

Baudrillard also captured the psychological side. Politicians, generals and viewers became hostages of the media rather than of real events:

“The war, along with all its military fakes, its putative soldiers and generals, its supposed experts and television presenters who constantly speculate about it all day long before our eyes, seems to be spinning before a mirror: am I good enough, effective enough, spectacular enough, perfect enough to step onto the stage of history?”

War has a media face

In 1991 the intermediary between viewer and event was television. Today there are dozens: X, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, news aggregators. Each imposes its own filter on reality.

In 2026 information arrives as short clips, memes and screenshots—fragments easier to spread than to verify.

Social-media algorithms amplify the effect. They pick content not for its veracity but for its grip on attention. An emotionally charged post gains more reach than a dry fact. Thus a feed emerges in which images compete not for accuracy but for reaction.

The difference between 1991 and 2026 is scale and speed. Then a television viewer received one version of events from journalists. Today a user receives thousands from anyone: eyewitnesses, propagandists, bloggers, bots. Yet the proliferation of sources has not brought the viewer closer to reality; it has widened the distance. The more versions there are, the harder it is to establish what actually happened.

The spice must flow; the show must go on

Thirty-five years on, the mechanics of hyperreality are even clearer. American YouTuber Brendan Miller, in a video essay, analysed the US conflict with Iran through Baudrillard’s lens and compared the situation to a TV show.

The blogger noted a telling sign: war exists chiefly as a set of images—clips in which combat footage is edited together with nods to mass culture.

In Miller’s view, once a conflict is perceived through the prism of hyperreality, its logic shifts. Goals blur, deadlines slip, and the audience’s reaction becomes the main yardstick of success. If you are dealing with a TV show, plans and schedules do not matter.

Through that lens, Miller suggests, the behaviour of US president Donald Trump makes sense. Constantly shifting aims and timelines, a thinly worked-out plan—none of this looks chaotic if you realise that for someone who treats war as a TV show, such details simply do not matter. The picture does.

The quintessence came in a line from an interview with ABC journalist Jonathan Karl, in which Trump addressed him directly:

“I hope you’re impressed. Well, how do you like our performance? Venezuela is obvious. And this may be even better. How do you like the performance?”

Miller concludes: this is not the language of a politician or a military strategist. It is the language of a TV producer whose task is to deliver spectacle.

Baudrillard described this mechanism in 1991. In his words, war lost political goals and set out to prove its own existence:

“Unlike previous wars, which had definite political aims—conquest or domination—what is at stake now is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future. It has no other aim than the proof of its very existence (this identity crisis concerns the existence of each of us).”

Hyperreality does not nullify consequences—they are felt far beyond the screen.

Baudrillard understood this contradiction. His texts did not claim that reality had vanished. They recorded a split: the image of an event and the original drift ever further apart, yet the consequences—physical, economic, human—remain entirely real.

Text: Sasha Kosovan