Let me suggest that it was not just the Abu Gharib pictures and the Nick Berg video, but also the picture from late March of the lynched mercenaries that has contributed to the national "funk" about the war. However, no matter what the actual sequence of the images, this email was enlightening to me as both Sullivan and his unnamed reader openly admitted that their support for the war "was underpinned by an unformed, yet felt assumption that it would go well." Sweet Jeebus! It scares the living crap out of me that supposedly well-informed people would use such vague rationale to support a war.  

This email was also enlightening for the way Sullivan and his reader admitted to having their view of the war temporarily shaken, and then permanently altered, simply by seeing images of the war:

First I can't believe that the person writing the email actually uses the phrase "unspoken assumptions that this would be easy," when we were constantly told how easy it would be to turn Iraq into Japan or Germany.

Second, if images from Iraq, especially those of the violent deaths of a civilian,  play such an admittedly formative role in the opinions of hawks such as Sullivan, no wonder he is still in support of the war. The excruciating images of Iraq civilians being savagely killed and/or wounded have hardly ever been released over the mainstream media (the same media Sullivan complains of being victimized by). If he thought the Abu Gharib and Nick Berg images were bad, then I wonder what he would think of the war if he saw these:

WARNING: These pictures are not faked, nor do they portray the Iraq war according the the Bush administration's talking points. Further, there are thousands of similar photos. Still further, I did not post even close to the most extreme photos.

Click on the time & date stamp below to view the photo's in the extended entry.