WASHINGTON, April 1: Graphic images of Americans being mutilated in Iraq could powerfully shake US public support for the occupation and may play into the presidential campaign, pollsters and media analysts said on Thursday.
After initially hesitating, US TV networks began showing the images of cheering Iraqis in Falluja celebrating the murders of four American security contractors whose bodies were burned, mutilated and strung up for public view.
Newspapers carried front-page pictures showing charred bodies surrounded by exulting mobs. "These pictures speak volumes. It's just what the Bush administration did not want. Americans are seen here as real victims, not just statistics," said pollster John Zogby.
The images immediately evoked comparisons to the 1993 killings of 18 US troops in Mogadishu, when crowds were filmed dragging the corpses of two US soldiers through the streets. Washington ended its military presence in Somalia soon afterwards.
"The media is linking the Falluja incident to Mogadishu and those images are already imprinted on our collective visual memory. Images are always processed through the previous knowledge that we have," said Cara Finnegan, a communications professor at the University of Illinois.
In the case of Mogadishu, the power and freshness of those memories were vastly reinforced when the incident became the basis for a 2002 Hollywood movie, "Black Hawk Down."
"There is a big difference between reading a report of casualties in Iraq and seeing the actual film," Finnegan said. The Bush administration, while expressing horror at the Falluja attacks, has said it will not be deflected from its determination to stabilize the country and hand sovereignty back to Iraqis at the end of June.
The Falluja images spread quickly on the Internet on Wednesday. Even as some US networks tried to tone them down, they were available in full and graphic detail on some web Internet sites.
TIME TO SINK IN: Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN correspondent, now a journalism professor at the University of Delaware, said it would take time for the latest images to sink in. Many Americans had still not seen them
"It will be interesting to see if this is a watershed, a turning point where people start to think that the Bush administration's arguments that things in Iraq are generally going well does not match what they are seeing on TV," said Begleiter, who teaches a class on the political effects of the Mogadishu incident.
"If that happens, we will see the beginning of the emergence of a credibility gap, which would be a major problem for the Bush administration," he said.
The administration has made strenuous efforts to keep the news from Iraq as upbeat as possible. It has banned TV crews from filming at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of dead US servicemen arrive back to the country. President George W. Bush has not attended any funerals of personnel killed in Iraq.
A Los Angeles Times poll taken before the Falluja killings showed the country closely divided over Bush's handling of Iraq with 49 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving.
Asked whether the invasion of Iraq was worth it, 48 percent including 81 percent of Republicans thought that it was, while 45 percent, including seven in 10 Democrats thought not. -Reuters
Bodies retrieved
BAGHDAD: The bodies of the four contractors killed in Fallujah have been retrieved by US forces, a senior military spokesman said on Thursday. -AFP