Bring out your dead
Pictures of flag-draped coffins could kill Bush's re-election hopes

American elections are frequently a duel between two photographs. The candidate tries to find the right picture, the snap which encapsulates his campaign: the young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK, or Ronald Reagan with his hand on his heart in front of a flag. His opponent hopes for the emergence of the wrong picture, the snap they didn't want on the poster: Gary Hart with a floozy on a yacht; Michael Dukakis looking like an Action Man model in a tank.

George Bush has so far struggled to locate his chosen photo: the turkey he was pictured serving in Iraq proved embarrassingly to be fake, the "Mission Accomplished" banner under which he parked his plane on an aircraft carrier now looks ludicrously premature. President Bush's handlers might have consoled themselves that there was at least no risk of a bimbo picture coming out but, this week, there was much worse. America started to see the photographs Bush was dedicated to suppressing.

Enclosed in the patriotic blaze of Old Glory, the coffins lie in rows in a hanger at Dover airforce base in Delaware. Each flagged casket contains the remains of another member of the American services killed in Iraq. The Pentagon refused to allow photo-opportunities for the soldiers' last posts.

But, in a development which must have made Bush wish he lived under the British system of state secrecy, 350 of these censored images of the dead have been released to an Internet lobbyist under freedom of information legislation.

This is a defeat for what was surely one of the most brutish manoeuvres of modern politics. The White House has claimed that they were protecting the dignity of the dead and the privacy of their families, but many families were desperate for their lost to have their moment on the evening news.

The truth is that the invisibility of the military fallen was a decision driven purely by spin. A governing belief of US politics is that the Vietnam war failed partly because news coverage made President Johnson resemble some kind of national funeral director, presiding over the obsequies of young men. Accordingly, Bush's image-handlers quite deliberately decided that neither he nor his war in Iraq would become associated with long, low boxes draped with the American flag.

It's not necessary to be anti-war to see this as an act of cruel duplicity. A leader's most profound decision is to ask his soldiers to die in a war. If this is a leader's sincere belief, then it's his/her prerogative, at least until the next election. But it is not acceptable to pretend that the consequence of his/her decision is anything but death.

There is a more subtle argument against the publication of photos of homecoming bodies, which is that, especially since the spread of the Internet, the images may be appropriated by anti-war campaigners who dislike and even despise the whole idea of soldiers. It's possible that some of their dead soldiers and their families would be appalled that they were being called in aid by pacifists.

But, if so, the solution to such misuse is clear. Members of the military should be asked when enlisting if, in the case of the worst happening, they would like publicity for their homecoming: the system would be something like an organ-donor card. The fact that the White House would never agree to this proves that the only family they are trying to protect by this ban on flagged-casket shots is the Bush one.

Although John Kerry remains dangerously silent and vague for a man who plans to be in the White House in less than nine months, this may be seen as the week when George Bush lost control of his photograph album. The publication of the cadaver montage - in which Bush's face is made up of squares containing smiles and stares of military men and women who are now all dust - threatens to become one of the most powerful propaganda images in history.

And now the coffin shots are out. Forced to explain how it can simultaneously be heroic to die for your country, but necessary to be shipped back in a silence and secrecy generally associated with shame, Bush may be on the way to becoming a president whose administration was snapped by photographs.

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