The first virtual war was described by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. For him, Operation Desert Storm in January and February 1991 was not a war but a media spectacle of the aerial destruction of the Iraqi Army. Desert Storm was the first war in history formatted by the media. For example, at the request of CNN, some of the bombing missions were carried out at night – even though this increased the risk of collateral damage and even friendly fire incidents; but CNN wanted this because it produced even more spectacular television pictures. Eight years later, in Kosovo, the technology for showing war reached a new level. The homing devices in the warheads of the bombs and missiles had become television cameras. In a world where the mass media rules, the aim of the war becomes not winning but showing; not capturing territory but capturing the audience. It is likely that the day is not far off when miniature cameras in bullets will show in slow motion how they approach a person (let us say, a terrorist) and enter his body – the ratings will be sky high. And from here it is just a short step to the idea of a demonstration war, even one for fun, like the one described by the Russian fiction writer Viktor Pelevin in his anti-utopian novel, S.N.U.F.F. He wrote about drones equipped with both television cameras and machine guns, flown by a long-distance operator, which at one and the same time shoot the enemy’s soldiers and film it for the television evening news.
The postmodern war is like a computer game. Together with the virtualization and dehumanization of the enemy, it becomes as safe as an electronic game, the aim being to have no losses for the technologically superior civilization. The death of Western military personnel becomes both an image problem and a legal problem, which they try to minimize. Already today, widows of British Army officers are filing multimillion-pound claims against the Ministry of Defence, demanding extra compensation for the death of their husbands in Iraq, as if death was not one of the professional risks an officer takes in a war zone. A hedonistic society is no longer prepared to come to terms with the death of its soldiers.
And now, inspired by the bloodless successes of ‘the little green men’ in Crimea, and wishing to demonstrate the technical modernization of the armed forces over the past few years, Russia has decided to stage its own exhibition war in Syria: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we present “Patriot” on tour.’ The newest name for an arm of service – the Air-Space Troops – suggests a futuristic mode: now we are going to be shown Star Wars, the battles of the future! This is exactly how the Russian media paints the operation in Syria: as an easy war, a bloodless game of noughts and crosses; a bit of fun in which these heroes with their high technology, these terminators in their hermetically sealed helmets, destroy an abstract, dehumanized, evil enemy. The reports issued by the General Staff amaze us with their attention to detaiclass="underline" workshops making suicide vests, warehouses with spare parts, garages housing pick-ups and armoured vehicles, headquarters and training camps – all are destroyed. All one can do is marvel at the professionalism of the Russian intelligence services, who know the enemy’s territory right down to the last bush. It is as if we are being given the chance to take part in an online shooting game: from underneath the wing of the jet fighter, take aim at the houses, the sheds and the hangars from which these funny little men are running. Television reports either that these fighters are running away, shaving off their beards and putting on niqabs, or turning up by sea in Odessa in their thousands, before going on to the Donbass to fight against the pro-Russian separatists.
The decidedly game-like, cartoon nature of this information is matched by the sheer impossibility of believing it. They bombed a workshop or an empty shed, and five hundred, or maybe just fifty, people gave themselves up? Or did they just pop off to a wedding in a neighbouring village? These reports contain no pain; no blood; no information about the dozens of casualties suffered by the peaceful population – the sorts of things reported by the international media and human rights organizations every day. All we hear about is the hi-tech operation, in which a couple of dozen Russian aeroplanes jokingly sorted out the enemy who could not be defeated by an international coalition headed by the USA using hundreds of aircraft and flying some seven thousand bombing sorties over the course of a year.
The apotheosis of this show came when Russia launched twenty-six cruise missiles from ships of the Caspian Sea flotilla as a celebratory salute in honour of Vladimir Putin’s birthday on 7 October 2015. They flew 1,500 kilometres over Iran and Iraq at a height of just fifty metres (and it was shown that four of them fell on Iranian territory), struck unidentified targets and made an indelible impression on the outside world, principally because their launch was totally pointless. Given that the so-called ‘Islamic State’ has no serious air-defence weapons, Russia could have hit the same targets using air-dropped bombs, which are infinitely cheaper than missiles, which cost one million dollars each; but, as they say, putting on a good show is priceless.
In the same celebratory tone, like in the Stalinist propaganda film Cossacks of the Kuban, television describes the daily life of Russian soldiers in Syria: they show ruddy-faced cooks serving up borshch and pancakes (everything made from Russian products, even the fruit juice, the correspondent stresses); prefabricated dormitories with air-conditioning; a bath-house with eucalyptus branches provided.[32] The Zvezda television channel of the Ministry of Defence enthusiastically describes daily life at the Russian air force base in Latakia as ‘destroying Islamic State in comfort’. Once again, this reminded me of an incident during the war in Kosovo, when an American pilot of a B2 stealth bomber, which had flown from its base in Missouri to bomb Yugoslavia, said: ‘The great thing about this plane is that you take off from base, carry out your mission, and return to wife, and children, and a cold beer.’
The question about the effectiveness of the military operation becomes lost behind the aesthetics of war porn and the simulacra of the virtual war. The fact was that three months of Russian bombardment did not bring about any change to the situation on the ground: but the opposition counterattacking on all fronts plainly did not tie in with the reports from the General Staff about the destruction of workshops and the Jihadists fleeing to Odessa. However, who needs military effectiveness when you have media effectiveness, and when Russia has got the whole world talking about its aircraft and cruise missiles?
Reality unexpectedly exploded upon this virtual story on 31 October 2015, with the crash of a Russian Airbus over Sinai and the death of 224 people – just as it came back to haunt America in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Jean Baudrillard wrote about all this in 2002 in his essay The Violence of the Global. In his opinion, the answer to the technological and information domination of the new world order is apocalyptic terrorism, as a return to physical reality. In its pursuit of illusory geopolitical bonuses and cheap media effects, Russia voluntarily stepped into a war with widespread international terrorism. Suddenly we became hostages in a game of noughts and crosses, which had seemed so far away and harmless when it was on our television screens and in the General Staff’s briefings. Now it has come into our homes; and it is no longer clear who or where will be wiped out.
32
In the classic Russian bath-house – the