Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor of Reason, a monthly magazine on politics and culture, who has written extensively on the political manipulation of culture, the ideological use of imagery and language, modern techniques of persuasion and the process of disseminating ideas.
In this LA Times op-ed, which is a must read in its entirety, Mr. Freund makes the following salient point in comparing the responses to the recent images of the Abu Ghraib prison and the beheading of Nicholas Berg:

The Abu Ghraib pictures reveal American soldiers humiliating their prisoners in a sadistic manner (in some images, the Americans are actually smirking). It’s a painful sight because it is cruel on its own terms (we don’t even know whether the terrorized individuals are actually guilty of anything) and because we regard such sadism as unworthy of our image of ourselves.
By contrast, Zarqawi intentionally videotapes and distributes his bloody atrocity; the literal slaughter of an innocent is offered as an example of his righteousness. For Zarqawi, the question of unworthiness simply never enters the calculation; that the action is inhuman is its point.
Shameless brutality of this degree has the power to transform the shame of Zarqawi’s enemies. Zarqawi has reminded his enemies that, unlike him, they are at least capable of shame.
Zarqawi’s righteous snuff movie is an act of lunacy, a gift to his enemies, and, one hopes, an unwitting suicide note.

Hat tip to Virginia Postrel for the link to Mr. Freund’s timely piece.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post (free online subscription required) has some interesting observations in this piece titled “Reassembling Iraq” based on his recent trip to Iraq. The entire piece is well worth reading, and the folloiwng will give you a flavor for it:

After each visit to Iraq over the past year, I’ve tried to weigh how things are going. At the end of a trip last week, one answer was that it depends on where you live. Even in the wilds of Mesopotamia, all politics is local.
Overall, Iraq is a mess. . .
Yet this disarray on the macro level masks local pockets of stability. Southern Iraq, where I traveled for a week with British troops, is surprisingly calm — thanks to a quiet alliance of tribal sheiks and Shiite religious leaders with the British occupiers. The British have been wise enough to let the Iraqis find their own solutions to problems. Their motto, says the British chief of staff in the south, Col. Jim Tanner, is that “one size doesn’t fit all.”
The Kurdish north is also relatively calm and stable. Kurdish political leaders know they’ve got a good thing going in their quasi-autonomy from the Arabs to the south. Their troops and clan leaders are maintaining order, and while they may pay lip service to the notion of the Iraqi state, they’re quite happy to be running their own show.
The nightmare area is the U.S.-controlled zone in the center of the country. This was always going to be the toughest piece of the puzzle. Where the Shiite south and Kurdish north are each relatively homogenous, central Iraq is an ethnic, religious and political jumble.
But even in the center, temporary pockets of stability have emerged over the past month, as the United States steps back from the brink of all-out urban warfare. Much like the British in the south, the U.S. occupiers now seem ready to accept some Iraqi solutions that are backed by the nation’s traditional power bases, such as the tribes, religious leaders and semi-respectable remnants of the old army.
Sometimes we’ll have to hold our noses at these local solutions, as when a former Republican Guard general restores order in Fallujah. But that kind of pragmatic approach seems preferable to waging a bitter war of occupation.
Unfortunately, the checkerboard Iraq that I’m describing isn’t any longer a single nation. It’s a country in the process of de facto partition — with the north and the south going their own ways and the center in a bloody state of ferment.