This Toronto Star piece looks at the U.S. military's motives for showing photos of the now-dead, most psychopathic Islamofascist militant in Iraq -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

An excerpt:

The military has clearly learned a few lessons since the killings of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, in a gunfight in July 2003. At the time, there was heavy skepticism among the Iraqi public about whether Saddam's ruthless progeny had, in fact, died.

Two days later, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided to release graphic photos of the two bloodied corpses. Uday's photo was particularly gruesome, a bloody laceration traversing his face, which appeared terribly bloated. "It is important for the Iraqis to see them, to know they're gone, to know they're dead and to know they are not coming back," Rumsfeld said.

Al-Zarqawi died Wednesday after two heavy bombs flattened a house in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.

The Iraqi government praised the killings, as did Iraq's Ambassador to Canada, Howar Ziad. "We are proud of the role of Iraqi forces in assisting their Coalition allies in killing one of the world's leading fascist terrorists," he said in a statement. "There is no dialogue with these murderers."

Beyond functioning as proof, however, the photo exhibit was also part of the U.S. and Iraqi government's propaganda machine, said Paul Kingston, a Middle East expert at the University of Toronto.

"The more dangerous backlash would be jihadists that would suggest (al-Zarqawi) hasn't been killed, that he's still around, and create this kind of mythical figure who roams around, which is what he was before he had been killed, this kind of mythical unifying figure," Kingston said.

Hence, the photos, to "put a kibosh to that."

Though both the White House and Iraqi authorities are being cautious about calling this a turning point in the raging Iraqi insurgency, they're trying to signal the beginning of the end of jihadist power, said Kingston.

"They'd make the case that foreign violence is at the root of this violence," he said, referring to the fact that al-Zarqawi was Jordanian. "Of course it's more complicated than that. Some of the violence is foreign, some is Sunni (Muslim) disaffection, some is criminal — so you can't simplify this equation to say that with Zarqawi gone, it will be better now."