Richard Blow

It is impossible not to be captivated by the image of Saddam Hussein, his beard unkempt and gray, his hair wild, the whole picture looking, as Kansas Senator Pat Roberts said on Sunday, like a homeless man.

Gone was the uniformed, swaggering tyrant we all knew from television, the man who referred to himself in the royal "we" and proudly spoke of a leader’s duty to his country when Dan Rather interviewed him earlier this year. The message of that brief snippet of film was clear: Saddam is beaten. Anyone who sympathizes with him should stop now, or suffer a similar—or worse—fate.

When this war is over and the occupation ended, this picture of Saddam will endure as an iconic image. And so it joins a series of made-for-television images that the war in Iraq has generated—images that shape our memory and interpretation of the Iraq war, and consequently its aura of legitimacy. This is what makes it so important to look at them closely.

The defining images of the Iraq war so far include the rescue of Jessica Lynch, American soldiers toppling a massive statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the dead bodies of Qusay and Uday Hussein, President Bush standing triumphantly on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and Bush holding aloft a golden turkey as he greeted the troops in Baghdad on Thanksgiving.

Splice those images together and they portray a simple, dramatic story of Americans fighting bravely and ousting evil men. That’s true insofar as it goes—but the stories behind the pictures are more complicated than that. (It has become the obligation of the print press to deconstruct the images propagated by television, which beams them out into the world without context or skepticism.)

For one thing, only some of them come from the press; the Bush administration has realized that it can provide its own footage, in just the way that PR firms create footage for use by local TV news stations. For another thing, the pictures are carefully edited.

Why did we only see five or 10 seconds of the Lynch rescue? Because other pictures would have contradicted the propaganda that the military wanted to create. Why did we only see five seconds of Saddam being gently poked and prodded by an American doctor? Because those seconds showed Hussein the way the military wants the world to see him—being humanely treated, but docile and unequivocally broken.

Then there’s the question of what pictures we don’t see; I can’t remember any photographs of dead Iraqis—or dead Americans, for that matter.

It’s tempting, and not entirely wrong, to react emotionally to the pictures of the Iraq war that we do get to see. The capture of Saddam is a huge accomplishment. Who doesn’t hope that at last he will be held accountable for his brutal crimes?

But our reactions can’t stop there. We can not look at these pictures naively, because they are not naively taken or distributed. Each has an explicit purpose—to create a war hero, to inspire our troops and demoralize the enemy, or to boost the president’s poll numbers. Almost always when a picture has a purpose, its truth is diluted.

We now know, of course, that Jessica Lynch was not really the hero, shooting to the last bullet, that the military portrayed her as; that the serious fighting wasn’t really over when the president landed on that aircraft carrier and said it was; and that the turkey was a prop. What will we eventually know about the capture of Saddam Hussein that contradicts the picture released on Sunday?

We can take a grim satisfaction in the deaths of evil men, like Saddam’s sons, or the humiliating capture of a hideous dictator. But we didn’t go to war to kill the Husseins. We went to war to stop Iraq from compiling and using weapons of mass destruction. After all, we knew those weapons were there.

The White House showed us pictures, and pictures never lie.

Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George Magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.