MORE ON THE IMAGES OF WAR

This morning it is the Post's Jim Hoagland taking the question of war imagery on.

(Although, early in the piece he writes that al Jazeera is a network "that has made no pretense of objectivity." Unfortunately, this is exactly not true. They still claim they are objective, since they air US views. If you can call airing a DOD briefing split screen with the goriest video of civilian casualties they can find "objective." The only difference lately is that the US press, so enamored of the network and its reporters during the invasion, has finally figured things out.)

But beyond the Arab press:

The Fallujah atrocity has been chased from TV screens and front pages in France and Italy by pictures of Iraqi youths brandishing grenade launchers beside burning U.S. oil tankers outside Baghdad. The gunmen are shown in iconic poses associated by the impressionable with Europe's history of revolution and resistance, fancied and real.

In many mainstream European publications, they are portrayed not as the Baathist killers or jihadist fanatics described at U.S. military briefings in Baghdad and Washington, but as authentic revolutionaries inspired by a new form of Arab nationalism being born in Iraq. I don't think that is true. But it will increasingly be accepted abroad as true if Washington's intentions remain cloaked in confusion.

I don't see how you can possibly think Washington's intentions are unclear. Its tactics, perhaps, but not its intentions. But Hoagland quotes a British commentator who watched the Falljah images and saw, not a small band of thugs, but an entire town rising up.

I quote him to suggest how differently the same images of an event can be seen and explained. U.S. officials cannot afford to take for granted that their actions or intentions will always be able or allowed to speak for themselves.

I'll say it again, at least within the Arab world, there is only one solution. If the White House isn't going to get its act together, someone else is going to have to do it.