President Bush: Iraq War

On January 28, 2003, in his second State of the Union address, President Bush presented his case for the war with Iraq:

"With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. . .

"And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own. . . .

We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."

Photographs cannot be true or false, but captions can. A big deal was made at the start of the Iraq war about the Bush administration's decision to rigidly enforce a ban on the publication of photographs of returning U.S. casualties.

But what was really at stake here -- the photographs themselves or the captions that might be associated with them?

Roland Barthes, the great French literary theorist, wrote of "anchorage," or the fixing of the meaning of a photograph by its caption. One of the most obvious examples of such fixing occurs in newspapers, where, under a photograph of a famous person, there is sometimes a caption describing what that person's expression signifies (e.g., she's mad!). While the stakes of describing a movie star's emotions don't tend to be high, the same cannot be generally said for descriptions of war photos.

Consider the following photograph of a woman, dressed in black, pointing to a photograph of a man in a dark suit and a woman wearing a white bridal dress.



To most viewers, the photograph probably comes across as sad and evokes a sense of loss on the part of the woman in black. But, without a caption, it is probably not the kind of photo that a government would find threatening or subversive.

Consider now the same photo with two very simple but different captions:

           
Al Halabja, Iraq, March 1989             Haditha, Iraq, June 2006

With reference to the timeline in the World Conflicts Today report on Iraq, figure out, for each caption, when and where the photograph was most likely taken.

Then pick one of the captions and expand it. Write a specific description of what the photograph is of and how the woman is feeling. Then explain which government or military organization would be likely to benefit from the publication of the captioned photo and which would likely be harmed.

For the record, the photograph (reproduced here courtesy of Getty Images, Inc.) was taken in Haditha on June 2, 2006.