[rchoudhury]

Baudrillard doesn't actually think the Gulf war didn't literally occur. He was using trollish language deliberately to highlight his more subtle (but, perhaps, relatively straightforward) ideas that televising the war meant that Americans learning about the wildly mismatched militaries' engagements via TV did not receive in their minds an accurate representation of what really was going on out there. While Baudrillard had a cogent point to make, putting it in these terms all but ensured perpetual confusion about what he meant (as demonstrated by the commenter above you). Here's the Wikipedia summary of Baudrillard's writings:

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl...

Baudrillard's concept of "simulacrum" is connected, and perhaps more interesting, even if attempting to apply it to the world results in weird claims like this one about the Gulf war.