Their critique does not generalize to the thesis that all information-production is pure spectacle

There are strong links between the theoretical meanderings described above and intellectuals’ response to an event like the Gulf War. The ’no comment’ approach was perhaps the most widespread in keeping with an indifferent critical climate, but for those who put their oar in, agnosticism was the order of the day. Baudrillard, for example, in his infamous article ’The Reality Gulf’ (1991a) written on the eve of hostilities, claimed that the war would not in fact take place. By this he meant that the media had created a ’hyper real scenario’ of fallacious commentary, empty predictions and reports of threats and counterthreats that were staged for the media in the first place. In Baudrillard’s opinion, the only real ’strategic cite is the TV screen from which we are daily bombarded’. There is no other reality; images and their referents are interchangeable. As a result we have on our hands, under the auspices of the UN as an ’extended contraceptive’, a ’Safe War’ (like safe sex) - ’a form of war which means never having to face up to war’ (1991a: 25).

Baudrillard’s piece as a description of the way the media worked during the crisis holds some validity,&dquo; but to go from there and suggest that taking any position on such an event by attempting to demystify the media ’simulacrum’ is simply mistaken - in effect just one more illusory exercise - is absurd to say the least. Baudrillard’s second article published in Liberation (1991b) entitled ’La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu’ (’The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’) goes even further in this direction. Baudrillard is willing to concede that in the event mass destruction did take place, but he goes on to argue that we must not be deceived into taking a moral stand on such an issue, but must instead engage in a sort of postmodern oneupmanship and reject all evidence so as to be ’more virtual than the events themselves’ (trans. in Norris, 1992: 194).

Baudrillard’s position is perhaps somewhat extreme, but its controversial avant-garde flavour assured it copy space. But similar sentiments dressed up differently begin to look disturbingly representative of the intellectual response in the media when one considers Michael Ignatieff’s article in the Observer (1991). ’The languages of moral concern hardly connect,’ writes Ignatieff. Some people decry the carnage on the road to Basra, others, like Ignatieff himself, support the war on the grounds that sanctions would have failed. But in the final analysis ’neither side has the slightest hope of convincing the other’ . What kind of critical commentary is this? Ignatieff’s relativist stance renders informed debate irrelevant and absolves him from having to defend his pro-war position.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Barbara Ehrenreich (one of Garafola’s new generation public intellectuals) in an article for Time magazine (1990), ’The Warrior Culture’, attributes the eagerness of the US to confront the Iraqis militarily to America’s culture of aggression. She starts off with a sort of Victorian anthropological chamber of horrors: dozens of ’pretechnological peoples’ including the Masai of East Africa and the North American Plains Indians rule that men cannot marry until they have killed in battle; in the Solomon Islands a chief’s status is reckoned by the number of skulls displayed around his door; Aztec kings use human hearts in religious rituals. America possesses just such a ’warrior culture’ with its unquenchable thirst for violence on television, its willingness to go to war on any pretext, and its warrior elite siphoning off nearly a third of the federal budget even in peace time. While left-wingers may blame this war on imperialism, Ehrenreich concludes, and right-wingers ’internationalism’ the real villain is in the culture itself.

Ehrenreich’s well-intentioned piece not only fails to convince ethnographically but, reducing international politics to culture, eliminates the possibility of dissent. Ehrenreich is arguing in effect, that Americans are unable to help themselves: their culture inculcates them with the urge to fight. Historical precedent, economic considerations and global power relations become irrelevant.

These three public intellectuals, highly visible in their respective countries, are unable to assess critically a major political event like the Gulf War. Baudrillard wants to live in ’virtual reality’, Ignatieff concludes that any adjudication is impossible and Ehrenreich reduces the conflict to specious cultural predispositions. Their lack of conviction, though, owes as much to the theoretical climate as to the requirements of the media. Baudrillard’s piece satisfies the market for the bizarre - the intellectual eccentric going over the top; Ignatieff encapsulates the views of the soft liberal readership of the Observer; while Ehrenreich’s article has obvious exotic appeal.

But even outside the requirements of the media, the Gulf War highlighted the general paralysis of the intellectual community worldwide. In the USA, Edward Said argues that intellectuals failed to join the debate because of their lack of ’affiliation with the public sphere’, provinciality and impotence (1991: 15). Even the editorial board of Dissent was divided over the issue, producing a wide spectrum of opinion. Todd Gitlin described the war as a ’catastrophe’ which was ’avoidable’, the late Irving Howe felt compelled to take a pro-war position but felt that the stance was ’uncomfortable’ for the Left, while Dennis Wrong concluded that because of the UN’s role this was a ’legal and just war’ (Morton et al., 1991:153-60). In France ex-radical ’soixante huitard’ Alaine Touraine gave the war his unequivocal support, while Pierre Bourdieu denounced it as ’drunken war-mongering’ (Zamiti, 1992 : 53 ; author’s trans.). In Britain, Christopher Norris comments that few intellectuals were able to resist the ’pressures of ideological recruitment’ (1992: 25) and The Times, in an article written during the conflict, described the ’old constituency of intellectual protest’ as ’in confusion’ (27 January 1991). But perhaps the most striking example of intellectual disarray was in Germany, where the issue of the war was the first event to break up decisively one of the most politically cohesive left-wing groups in Europe. Veterans of 1968 Enzensberger and Brumlik came out in support of the Allies as other intellectuals appeared to flounder in self-contradiction: Jurgen Habermas commented that the war was ’justified’ (as opposed to ’just’); Cohn-Bendit supported the war while at the same time condemned the hypocrisy of the intellectuals for ignoring the suffering of the Iraqi people (Rabinbach, 1991 : 462).