You do not have to work too hard to convince people in Asia of the transcending power of a misleading picture. Beijing almost never overcame the 1989 photograph of the Tiananmen protestor seeking to stymie the entry of the army tank into the square.
Almost a decade later, Indonesians will find it hard to forget the scene of an impatient International Monetary Fund managing director, Michel Camdessus, glaring at then president Suharto. The desperate Suharto reluctantly inked his name to IMF loan documents that brought in billions in rescue funds but whose conditions, critics say, prolonged the misery.
And, today, it is doubtful that Arabs in particular, and Muslims in general, will soon forget the sickening photos and videos of gross mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US captors.
But dramatic pictures - even the best of them - do not always tell the whole story. Years after the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, China was enmeshed in a profound social and economic modernisation while the west was still fixated on the picture.
The image of a crippled Indonesia endures, even as the country with the world's largest Muslim population celebrates next month its progress toward democracy with its first-ever direct elections for national leaders.
Even the stomach-churning videos of Iraqi detainees are much less than the complete picture of the US mission there. Rebuilt schools and refurbished hospitals do not provide the kind of gripping pictures that dominate the evening news. But over time, the reality of all this good and hard work can overcome the tawdry and immoral if - and it is a big if - the US does not slip up on the image front again.
This is why the Bush administration's nomination and the Senate's confirmation of John Negroponte as the first US ambassador to postwar Iraq is mind-boggling. I not only like the outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, I admire his decades of dedication. But he is wrong for the post.