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26 July 2003: "U & Q continued"

In the latest instance of "Saddamned of you do, Saddamned if you don't," the American occupation authorities are taking flak from various quarters for their release of post-mortem photographs of Uday and Qusay. Last Thursday saw the release of photos of the bodies laid out on gurneys at Baghdad International; on Friday, journalists were invited to view the corpses after they had been touched up by a mortician. Certainly, the released evidence is pretty convincing. Uday's identity is indicated by dental records and the permanent results of surgery performed in 1996 (including the serial number on a metal bar implanted in the left leg), while DNA tests indicate the two corpses were brothers; Qusay's identity is reinforced by dental records.

Condemnation of the Americans' course of action was, predictably, not long in coming. Various voices across the Arab world have criticised the Americans for defiling the bodies by putting them on display, instead of washing, shrouding and burying them at the earliest opportunity as required by muslim custom. Strangely, however, those same voices appear to be in no hurry to condemn Arab television news channels al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which displayed footage of the corpses without any evident compunction. Crtics of the Bush administration in the West have remarked that the photos released Thrusday were gratuitous.

In response, there appears to be an undertone in the commentary on various blogs which suggest that, well, gosh, Uday and Qusay were such unpleasant characters, who cares what some Arabs think if some liberties are taken with the corpses? I don't subscribe to this train of thought (at least, as I perceive it), but there are considerations which need to be taken into account.

The most obvious question is what kind of reaction we could have expected, had the Americans not produced the photographs, and had indeed buried the bodies as soon as possible? The most likely result would have been criticisms—in many cases from the same people—insinuating, or even uttering outright accusations, that the bodies did not belong to Uday and Qusay, that the Americans had killed the wrong guys and were trying to cover this up by burying the evidence as quickly as possible. In all honesty, I would have been suspicious myself if events had taken this course; as I noted last Tuesday, there has been no shortage of hastily disseminated reports which later had to be revised in this conflict. As a result, full public disclosure was, in my opinion, the right way to go, however seemingly gratuitous.

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