Thoughts on American War Crimes in Iraq

Earlier this evening, Trix posted a link to CBS's coverage of the abuse scandal in Iraq.

The story is sobering, to say the least.  Aside from the victims of the abuse (not to mention the victims of the occupation, more generally), this story will perhaps cast an unfortunate light on many of the men and women who try to serve honorably in a war waged by a President who himself could never muster such courage.

Having said that, I wonder about two things.
   

First, a major news network ran this story; will it ultimately get wide coverage from the major media outlets?  

Second, if so, what kind of effect could this have on public perception of the war?  My knowledge of everything surrounding the Vietnam war is embarrassingly weak (-so please correct me if I'm wrong), but it's my understanding that among the things that influenced the American public's discomfort with the war was the widely-publicized photograph of an American soldier holding a revolver to the head of a Vietnamese man.  The content of that image is of course different from the one with which many Americans were already familiar: namely, the number of soldiers who were dying in Vietnam.  But one can understand how photographs such as that one vividly expanded the public's awareness of yet another aspect of the war.

Over the past week or two, we've finally begun to see photos of American coffins returning from Iraq. That in itself is disquieting and rightly so. And I suspect that's contributed to some of the shift in public perception concerning the war (-it's certainly not the fact that American soldiers and Iraqi civilians have been dying; that's been happening for quite some time). I wonder, however, whether learning that some of our soldiers have committed war crimes isn't the next kind of powerful lesson that could help shatter the glass menagerie that is much of America's view of the war.  

It may be that one of the major media outlets would need to not only run the story but also run one or more of the photographs.  Or it may be that such a story simply contributes to the awareness that, far from our soldiers being welcomed as liberators, things have "begun" to go terribly wrong.  If half of the American people can't see the wrongfulness of this war, perhaps they can at least wince at the idea of 17 of our own committing violations of the rules of war.