The images are engraved onto the memory, pictures that become powerful summations of the nation acting in extremis - going to war.
Conjure them up: the battleship Arizona exploding at Pearl Harbor, Marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima, the naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, the South Vietnamese official shooting a man in the head on a Saigon street.
A deluge of images of the war in Iraq compete for that iconic status: an American soldier carrying a wounded Iraqi enemy, a statue of Saddam Hussein tumbling down, a triumphant President Bush in a fighter pilot's uniform, a despondent Hussein undergoing a dental exam, burned bodies hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, rows of flag-draped coffins in a military transport plane, a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a stool, his body apparently wired for electricity.
Which pictures attain that status will depend on how the nation chooses to remember this war - as an altruistic attempt to liberate an oppressed people, a well-meaning but misguided incursion into a complicated culture, or a blatant abuse of American power.
"The meaning of a picture comes from what is inside our heads, not from what's in the picture," says David Perlmutter of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. "We have pre-existing biases, prejudices and opinions and we look for pictures to confirm them."
Consider the photographs of 12-year-old Ali Ismael Abbas, who lost both his arms in the early days of the Iraq war, apparently in a U.S. missile attack. Those images quickly assumed iconic status in anti-war Europe while they remained virtually unnoticed in America.
"We cannot say what will be the iconic photograph of this war, because we cannot say how we will make sense of this war," says Barbie Zelizer of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Perlmutter says that while many remember certain pictures as having a profound effect on their view of the war in Vietnam, the public opinion polls do not back that up. It is only in retrospect that we give those images the power to have fixed our views, he says.
The power of photography in wartime has been recognized since 1862 when Matthew Brady put on display in New York his photographs of the dead of the Battle of Antietam, the deadliest day in American history. Contemporary reviews of the show record that Brady's photos brought home the horror of war in a way never before experienced.
