Deploying images of enemy bodies: US image warfare and strategic narratives

<jats:p> This article investigates the practice of post 9/11 US image warfare through an analysis of three sets of enemy capture and killing: Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. Specifically, the article examines these images in terms of their potential to support, complicate, and/or undermine the strategic narratives of the Bush and Obama administrations as they relate to the Iraq War and the killing of Osama bin Laden, respectively. Today’s new media ecology complicates the relationship between images and strategic narratives. The analysis finds that the capture and death images of the Hussein family primarily served to reinforce the Bush administration strategic system narratives of American dominance and hegemony, the illegitimacy and oppression of the Hussein regime, and of ‘justice’; however, the images can also be interpreted as complicating and potentially undermining these same narratives. The absence of Osama bin Laden death images supported the Obama administration’s counter strategic narratives that focused more on an American identity of restraint and rule of law. The ‘situation room’ photo that became the representative image of the Bin Laden killing also reinforced given strategic narratives by providing a more innocuous and legitimate way, albeit still violent, to communicate a story of American military power and justice. </jats:p>