[Tchocky]

When thinking about those days in February/March 2003, I like to read over Baudrillard.
Tough & gnarly, but I think his analysis, written less than a fortnight before the war, has been borne out in practice.

"Evil" is what arrives without prevention, and therefore without the possibility of prevention. It is, of course, the case with September 11. It is precisely that event that is radically opposed to the nonevent of the war. September 11 is an impossible and unimaginable event. It is carried out even before being itself possible (even disaster films did not anticipate it; on the contrary, they exhausted the imaginary possibility of such an event). It is about the extreme unforeseeable (where one finds a paradox according to which a thing does not become possible until only after it has taken place).
The difference is complete with the current war, which, by contrast, has been envisaged, programmed, and anticipated so much that it does not even need to take place. And even if it takes place in "reality," it will already have virtually taken place and thus it will not be an event. Here, reality is a virtual horizon. This take-over by the virtual is further reinforced by the fact that the announced war is like the double, the clone of the first Gulf war (just like Bush is his father's clone). The crucial event has thus been bracketed by two cloned events.
One can understand better from this perspective how this current war is a substitute event, a ghost event, and a puppet [fantoche] event bearing the image of Saddam. This is an immense mystification -- for the Americans themselves. With September 11 a gigantic task of contraception developed at the same time as a process of mourning. The idea was to ensure that September 11 had, in fact, not taken place, using the same principle of prevention, but this time retrospectively. An endeavor without hope or end.

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=494