  Baudrillard’s reflections on the Gulf war take a similar position, seeing it as an attempt of the New World Order to further rationalize the world, arguing that the Gulf war really served to bring Islam into the New World Order (1995: 19). The first study titled “The Gulf war will not take place” was initially published a few days before the actual outbreak of military hostilities and repeats his earlier concept of “weak events” and frozen history. Baudrillard to the contrary, the Gulf war took place, but this did not deter him from publishing studies claiming during the episode that it was not “really taking place” and after the war asserting that it “did not take place” — arguing that it was a media spectacle and not a genuine war. Baudrillard does not help us to understand much about the event and does not even help us to grasp the role of the media in contemporary political spectacles. Reducing complex events like wars to categories like simulation or hyperreality illuminates the virtual and high-tech dimension to media events, but erases all their concrete determinants. And yet Baudrillardian postmodern categories help grasp some of the dynamics of the culture of living in media and computer worlds where people seem to enjoy immersing themselves in simulated events (witness the fascination of the Gulf war in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trials during 1994–6, the Clinton sex scandals, and various other media spectacles throughout the 1990s, and the September 11 terror attacks in the early days of the third  millennium).[13]