Turning History into Happening: The First Iraq War

Abstract

“If there was one undisputed victor in the Gulf War I it was CNN.” So claimed Danny Schechter, a former producer at two large television news shows (NBC and ABC), and he had the numbers to prove his case: CNN increased its audience from a few million in the early eighties to 184 million in the 1990s (1998, 10). The announcement of the war on January 16, 1991, was broadcast to over sixty million households, the largest audience at that point for a single event in television history. George H. W. Bush and his advisors, convinced they would be the undisputed victors of the Gulf War, celebrated that they had, in Bush’s own words, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome” once and for all.² They jeered at the “opportunity” that Saddam Hussein had given the Western world when he invaded Kuwait; James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state went so far as to say that the “entire planet is in this madman’s debt” because Hussein’s “brutal invasion of Kuwait provided the unexpected opportunity to write an end to fifty years of Cold War conflict with resounding finality” (Engle 2010, 26).

Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.

—Nam June Paik¹