In the long line of images set to become iconic memories from the Iraq war, add one more.

When U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad on Thursday announced that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was dead, they showed pictures to prove it.

The framed and matted images of the Al-Qaida in Iraq leader, of him both dead and alive, were broadcast on television and in newspapers, including The Roanoke Times.

There he was: the terrorist leader in the desert, dressed in black, carrying a machine gun. And there he was: the subject of a three-year manhunt, caught dead in a tight close-up, his eyes closed, his face bloody.

If all images convey meaning, what was the meaning contained in the juxtaposition of the tyrant and the tyrant laid low?

The contrast between the two images of al-Zarqawi could not have been stronger, and that was what the military was aiming for, said Virginia Tech military historian Hayward "Woody" Farrar.

Farrar believes the psychological operatives who likely decided how to present the photos were aiming not at the domestic audience of Americans, but at al-Zarqawi's followers.

"When he was alive, he was a vital insurgent, a fighter," Farrar said. "Now he is dead, dead, dead.

"His face is bloated. He is helpless and weak. He is not such a big deal. They wanted to show that contrast."

In the post-mortem image, al-Zarqawi's head appears to be lying on bloody concrete. His eyes are closed. There is a cut above his left eye. Coagulated blood fills his nostrils. The image seems to be a frame from a video. There is a time stamp in the bottom right corner.

The military likely had two purposes for releasing the photo of al-Zarqawi dead, Farrar said. First, it proves the man believed to be responsible for bombings and assignations is dead. Second, it serves as potent psychological warfare, the ultimate "gotcha."

"It's bizarre theater," Farrar said. "The aim is to humiliate his followers, to intimidate them and to show that their cause is not going to work."

Roberta Culbertson, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the long-term effects of mass violence and war, thinks the al-Zarqawi images were meant to raise U.S. morale as much as to demoralize our terrorist enemies.

But Culbertson doesn't think the images work. In death, al-Zarqawi looks asleep, which is an image of safety, she said. "We want our monsters to look like monsters."

But Culbertson finds symbolism in the fact that a man associated with the severing of innocent heads has come to be pictured as a displaced head. It's a kind of symbolic decapitation, she said.

"An eye for an eye, that is playing there somewhere," she said.

Culbertson said bringing back the head of the enemy is a strong motif in war from ancient times. In some cultures, it is common for people to use the enemy head as a soccer ball, or otherwise defile it. There is something, she said, about taking liberties with people who have tried to hurt you.

For each notch along the timeline of the war on terrorism, there has been a corresponding photograph.

Defeats, both physical and psychological, have come home as images including American war dead and tortured prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

So have victories, such as Saddam Hussein looking powerless on the ground near his "rat hole" after his capture.

Al-Zarqawi's death face is not the first image of a killed high-level enemy from the war. When Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay were killed in 2003, graphic images of their dead bodies were released.

Photos more graphic than the image of al-Zarqawi that ran in The Roanoke Times were published on blogs, including Drudge Report.

Images of dead enemies have often found their way into the public. But the image of the dead is often not the image that lives on with the strongest currency, said Farrar. When the Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967, his picture was taken both alive and dead.

But it is the iconic image of Guevara that today emblazons T-shirts that helped cement Guevara's reputation.

That, Farrar said, is what the administration is fighting against with the dead images of al-Zarqawi.