Looking At War

On the op/ed page of last Sunday's New York Times there was this important piece about looking at the images of war.

The public outcry after many newspapers printed grisly images of the charred bodies of American civilians in Falluja, Iraq, should have come as no surprise. Photographs are powerful, and Americans have long found it difficult to face those that capture the horror of war.

And Martha Sandweiss finishes up with this:

Those incensed by the pictures should ask themselves what is most troubling, the fact that the violence happened or that we have photographs of it? No image of war is ever as brutal as war itself.