From The American Thinker
We are all probably tired of this story by now but the way ahead looks to get worse. Not from the as yet to be seen pictures of what happened but of what is about to happen.
Images are powerful. The cross-play between the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, on the one hand, and the horrific beheading of Nick Berg, on the other, is only the beginning, however. Lee Harris, in a characteristically brilliant essay at Tech Central Station, looks ahead to the images which will soon be coming to the attention of the American public: American soldiers being tried in Iraq for crimes against Iraqi prisoners, with howling mobs of Iraqis in full-throated anger protesting the injuries against their honor.
When the average American sees images of other average Americans on trial in Iraq, howled and screamed at by mobs of Iraqis, whose side you do think he will be on -- the side of the Iraqis or the side of men and women whose only difference from himself is that they were assigned to a miserable job in a hellhole of a prison in the midst of a war that isn't quite a war, fighting an enemy who isn't quite an enemy.
Harris then moves in on the really important idea: that Americans are being given more and more reasons to hate our enemies, and to define our enemies very, very broadly.
The enemy's compelling images show what we are fighting against in Iraq; but there are no equally compelling images that show us what we are fighting for -- an "image gap" that is already causing many well wishers of the administration to question a policy in which we are endlessly willing to help a people who refuses to offer us even a single image of themselves caught in the act of displaying friendliness toward us -- a people who, on the contrary, take every photo opportunity given to them to show how much and how deeply they hate us; and who, when not given such an opportunity by us, are quite able to make one for themselves.
There are many more thoughts to ponder in the article.
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