Charles Paul Freund has a fine piece at Reason Online about the complexities of controlling war images and the public's reaction to them. A lot of the discussion about the Dover photos seems to hinge upon the speaker's personal opinion of the war and how release/suppression of such photos will bring the public around to their point of view. This is rather simplistic, as Freud points out. For the first two years of World War II, the government suppressed all documentary images of American death, just as they had in World War I, for fear such images would demoralize the public and erode support for the war. But by 1943, they decided the public had grown complacent about the war and released many images of American dead to shore up support and drive home the point that the war was far from won.

There is, of course, an apparent contradiction between these two approaches. If FDR's original view was valid—that death images would demoralize the public—then displaying it in the latter part of the war (when the vast majority of U.S. war deaths occurred) risked undermining the American military's demands for unconditional surrender, at least in Europe. If his later, revised view was correct—that death imagery would increase public fervor—then displaying them in the first, dark months of the war might well have helped counteract the effect of so much negative military news. (As it happens, "Noble Sacrifice" against great odds was the underlying theme of many early Hollywood war movies.)

There is an obvious third proposition: Neither of these generalizations about the effect of death imagery was necessarily correct. While there is often a plain and unchanging personal meaning in such images of death, there is no inevitable political meaning in them; rather, their political meaning and impact can change according their context. The most important factor in that context is probably not whether a given conflict appears to be going well, but whether the viewer of such images believes the war's cause to be just, and its pursuit purposeful. If you believe that about the Iraq war, then you probably interpret the coffin images a certain way; if you don't, you probably see a different picture.

Hiding such imagery, as many administrations have done, is in the end an act of self-defeating censorship, one that raises questions about the state's view of the citizens it is sending to war, and potentially about the state's view of the war itself. However, disseminating such images as an act of war criticism is reductionist and prone to backfire, because such an act seeks to impose a single political meaning on images whose meaning is changing and fluid. Whether such images portray honorable sacrifice or something very different depends on how the viewers of the images perceive the war itself, and not, as some involved in this debate seem to believe, the other way around.