I made that phrase up, though Baudrillard would probably have somewhat agreed - at any rate, he was a cultural critic, so he wasn't interested in the geopolitical causes of events, and more the "semiotic" causes, so to speak. I can't think of the right word here, I am not a sociologist/media studies major, but it's something like, How do the cultural symbols prevalent at the time and the media in which they are expressed form our notion of "the thing that happened."

Yes, there is one way of answering the question, like you say, which is, Saddam invades Kuwait for oil, and the US has to take action to restore the geopolitical balance in the area. For a post-modern philosopher, the interesting tack is more like, "The recognition by the administration of the opportunity to turn this into a show worth watching about American heroism is what drove the sequence of events."

edit: grammar