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
Sounds an awful lot like Alex Jones. "I'm just asking a question, talkin about hypotheticals".
If you toss out a theory and then suggest it should be read as fiction then it's got about as much value to anyone as Klingon philosophy. And the Klingons are a lot more consistent than most Continental philosophy.
With all continental philosophy, my general attitude is that the best approach is to see it as an attempt to narrate the human condition rather than to theorize about it, in the strict sense. And yes, it's impossible to know which mode a particular Continental philosopher is in. As in, just how seriously is this dude taking himself? (it's mostly dudes.) We can tell from accounts of their lives that they were pretty serious in their pursuits of course - maybe not the French as much, certainly the Germans and Scandinavians.
Comparing this philosophy to demagoguery is a bit of a cheap insult mostly because the Continental philosophers weren't trying to rile the masses up. Maybe Nietzsche made the most serious attempt at doing so, though I think most of his work gained prominence posthumously.
I think the comparison to sci-fi is apt - SF writers perhaps are the most self conscious about the metaphysical implications of their subject matter or storylines, out of all writers, I'd say. But seeing as so much of that era was really a response to the vacuum left by the decline in Christianity's influence, it couldn't help being somewhat bizarre and self-contradictory. It's a tough act to follow if you aren't going to let yourself rely on divine intervention, and have to be the bastard child of Enlightenment thought as well as a millennia of Christian metaphysics. So of course, so much of it sounds like some kooky alien story.
I usually don't read French philosophers, but when I do, I simply take it as an elaborate language game. It's like enjoying any team sport, where when one players says, "we are going to crush them!", it's generally not an actual plan involving physical crushing. In this case, I see Baudrillard simply using the idea of the Gulf War, to make a point about the larger context in which it took place - the media images, the self-stylings of various leaders, how it was commented on, etc. It was the world's first "cable news war," and while Baudrillard was not alone in noticing this at the time, certainly he had anticipated it in his previous writings on simulacra and hyper-reality.