In 1993, the television news showed mobs of Somalian citizens dragging the bodies of U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu. Forty-eight hours later, President Clinton committed to ending military intervention in Somalia within six months. Policymakers assumed that the images would spur Americans to demand that we withdraw our troops, Dauber says. So did the media—Dauber notes a quote from the New York Times that the American public wanted to "scuttle the Somalia expedition as soon as American corpses appeared on the television screen."

But polls showed that this demand was not actually there, Dauber says. Only a minority of Americans wanted to immediately withdraw from Somalia. But because Congress and other leaders interpreted the images in one specific way, they were suspicious of the polling results.

Images can always be interpreted in more than one way, Dauber says. And, news images don’t come alone. "The administration lost sight of the fact that the media was shaping a narrative around those images and that the administration could have contributed to that narrative—with speeches, with press briefings, with the way they spoke about the deaths." An alternative interpretation such as "we can’t permit anyone to treat American soldiers in this manner," might have justified a continued or increased presence in Somalia.

The common interpretation of those events has affected American policy in such situations ever since, in talk of avoiding "another Mogadishu," Dauber says. Before the recent terrorist attacks, policymakers assumed that public support for military interventions was fragile, and that "if the wrong photographic image came over the wires, that support would shatter," Dauber says.

"It’s far too soon to know whether this is still the case after nine eleven," Dauber says. "Support for the current action continues to remain very high. There’s an understanding that it’s obviously a different situation than the humane interventions of the nineties, because it’s clearly about self defense." This support (indicated by polls) also demonstrates that the phenomenon of "casualty shyness" may be a myth. "The American people understand that going to war entails casualties," Dauber says. "The question isn’t whether or not there will be casualties. The question is whether or not those casualties are in defense of what the public understands to be an honorable cause. And if they believe that those casualties are not excessive and are not a function of incompetence, then they will continue to support the military effort."

Dauber is a member of the defense advisory committee on women in the services.