Ignore the Picture. The Frame’s The Thing.

When I commented on a recent article by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, I honestly thought I had read the worst piece of journalism I was going to read all week.

I was wrong.

This is even worse, and, as it happens, it’s also by Mr. Kenicott. Here’s how it begins:

The frame surrounding an image of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s head, revealed to the world as proof the terrorist is dead, is bizarre. When the picture was displayed at a U.S. military news briefing, Zarqawi’s face was seen inside what appeared to be a professional photographic mat job, with a large frame, as if it were something one might preserve and hang on the wall next to other family portraits. One function of frames is to bound an image, and close down its open edges; frames delimit, both physically and by extension, metaphorically. But that was the last thing this frame was doing.

Huh??

Look, I can understand if Kennicott thought that framing the photograph of a dead murderer’s face was out of the bounds of good taste. To be perfectly honest, if I sat and really thought about it, I’d probably think it was a bit tasteless, too. But I haven’t, and I’m not going to. See, it is absolutely immaterial to me what sort of frame was used to display Zarqawi’s death portrait. What was material to me was Zarqawi’s lifeless face. That was the important thing. Everything else was for show and didn’t mean a darned thing.

Kennicott’s modus operandi appears to be to obsess about the fripperies and to ignore the vital. This column is just more of the same.

So frames delimit, he says. They close off boundaries. Well, yes, in the sense that if you’re displaying something you want it to look presentable and to do that, you enclose it in a frame that presents the important part of what you’re framing, and covers the unimportant. See, few really care if you cropped a photographa little crookedly or you left one edge ragged. They care about the photograph.

But this isn’t really about photography and gilt-edged frames. This, to Kennicott, is a metaphor that he’s going to explain whether we want it or not. But first, he’s going to lie to you just a little bit.

In this country, a familiar dynamic played out. Supporters of the war cheered, and criticized the war’s opponents (by now a sizable majority of Americans) if they didn’t cheer, too. More cautious voices broached the idea — though at the peril of having their patriotism questioned — that this may not be the desired turning point in the conflict. They reminded us that we had already seen similar photographs of Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein’s dead sons, and that Saddam’s capture was also supposed to be the beginning of the end of the mayhem.

Guess what, folks. Little to none of what Kennicott described actually happened. In fact, critics of the war were prominent in news articles and on television all day yesterday – far more prominent, by the way, than a supporter of the war in a similar circumstance. How many quotes did you read or hear from Michael Berg yesterday? How many quotes did you read or hear yesterday from the family of Fabrizio Quattrocchi or from Ashraf al-Ahras. Much fewer, I’ll wager.

There was no peril of having patriotism questioned by thinking that Zarqawi’s death wouldn’t be the magic turning point. As a matter of fact, here’s what I, a supporter of this war, said yesterday:

It doesn’t mean that terrorism inside Iraq is simply going to melt away, but it does mean that it’s suffered another major setback and it is a significant symbolic victory for the good guys.

I doubt very seriously that you could find more than a handful of folks out there in bloggerland or on the television who were claiming that Zarqawi’s death is a major turning point. More than a few were saying that it could be, and for very good reasons. Kennicott’s not interested in those reasons. He flatly denies that it’s a turning point because, well, other things haven’t been turning points either.

What he doesn’t understand, though, is that there are no magic bullets here and there never were. I’m sure he’s smart enough to know that but he chooses not to see it. What he wants is someone to wave a magic wand and have everything in Iraq become peaceful and idyllic, as they believe it was during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Except that it was peaceful and idyllic there either, unless you were a member of his favored ethnic minority. If you were anyone else, a Marsh Arab or a Kurd for instance, it was a place of repression, constant fear, torture, rape, and death.

See, Zarqawi’s framed head isn’t a symbol of victory against a brutal enemy. It’s a trophy, says Kennicott. It signifies nothing save vanity.

The framed image of a head also has a disturbing sense of the trophy to it — proof of another small victory brought home from battle — which connects it to what might be called the ultimate self-destructing image of victory: the “Mission Accomplished” photo-op staged on an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003. Even before the war had definitively turned sour, that single image established a pattern. The war would be politicized.

Oh dear! Not a politicized war! If this war were politicized, that would make it exactly like every other war ever fought on the planet, ever!

Apparently, Kennicott thinks we’re either incredibly stupid or plain gullible. And that’s just the beginning.

What began as a war of necessity, premised on the slam-dunk certainty that Saddam Hussein was staring us down with weapons of mass destruction, eventually became a war of ideas. If there were no weapons, then at least it was a war of liberation, bringing freedom and democracy to a land in desperate need of both. And when that war devolved into clouds of dust and pools of blood as the country broke into religious and ethnic factions, and the rule of law was extinguished by terrorists and militias, the war of ideas began to seem more like another thing — a war of trophies.

Guess what? The war was initially, and always has been, about all of those things. We are in Iraq not merely because of WMDs but also because the War on Terror is a war of ideas and because we had the historic opportunity to free 24 million people from a tyrant. Anyone who tells you otherwise wasn’t paying attention for the past six years. they sure as heck weren’t paying attention in 1998 when Congress made it the policy of this country to overthrow Saddam Hussein because of all of those reasons.

There’s something more egregious at work here. It’s not just that Kennicott is naive. He’s also again dishonest. The rule of law hasn’t been extinguished by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the rule of law didn’t exist in Iraq until we got there. What existed before that was the rule of despotism which I’m sure Kennicott would grant is different. Today Iraq has the rule of law as evidenced by Saddam Hussein’s ongoing trial, as evidenced by a police force that grows in number and ability every day, as evidenced by the fact that the Iraqi government, elected by the people, still governs and did not crumble. The rule of law extinguished in Iraq? Sheer nonsense.

Zarqawi is gone and good riddance. But there’s nothing in the image of his face that deserves a frame. It’s a small thing, to be sure. But it suggests a cynicism about this war that is profoundly distressing. Our political and military leaders simply can’t resist packaging the war and wrapping it up in a bow.

That’s perfectly typical of Kennicott and his ideological brethren. What is important to them is not the picture frame but the frame itself. That’s always been the case in Iraq and I suspect that it will always be so. There will always be folks like him around to remind us that no good deed goes unchided and that no matter how great the accomplishment, there’s always something to nitpick. Thankfully, there are people who see more clearly and they’re the ones who are helping Iraq realize its potential more and more every day.

As for him, I suspect he has a much more promising future working in an art supply store. He’s certainly failed as a journalist.

UPDATE: Mark In Mexico whipped up a selection of frames for the Zarqawi photo. I like the one with the little ducky. He also has a few links of definite interest.

UPDATE TWO: I wasn’t the only one who blogged about this colums. See Hugh Hewitt for several more linke, though, I don’t think he liked me post very much at all. It seems to have been missed altogether.