Juan Cole: Obama Right Not to Release Usama Photo

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

President Obama’s decision not to release photographs of Usama Bin Laden’s disfigured corpse is wise and decent.

Obama is right that the photo would be used by radicals to whip up emotions.

But it should also be remembered that a Mahdi Army member surreptitiously filmed the execution of Saddam Hussein on his cell phone, and that it was then spread around the internet and to other cell phones, and produced a very negative reaction in the Muslim world. I remember on a bulletin board one Saudi young man saying that he never liked Saddam, but that seeing him taunted to his grave had disgusted him. The video robbed the Bush administration of a propaganda coup, the demise of Saddam, and instead created a fiasco for the US image....