By Steven and Cokie Roberts

NEA Columnists

“The rule book of international relations has been torn up,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said last week. “Nations, even ones as large and powerful as the USA, are affected profoundly by world events, and not affected over time or at the margins, but at breakneck speed and fundamentally.”

Blair was talking about many forces that cross boundaries at “breakneck speed,” from people and pollution to disease and dollars. But the day before Blair spoke, he stood next to George Bush at the White House, while the president focused on two other globally traded commodities that are damaging his presidency: images and ideas.

For the first time, Bush talked frankly about the mistakes he’s made in Iraq, and he demonstrated how slowly he’s come to understand the worldwide media universe in which he’s forced to operate.

In that universe, technological innovations mean that even “large and powerful” nations cannot control what ordinary people hear and learn. The rulebook has been “torn up” because everybody can now see how the game is played. Slogans and spin cannot erase reality.

Start with Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where inmates were tortured by their American captors. Bush described those excesses as the biggest mistake of the war: “We’ve been paying for that for a long period of time.”

Abu Ghraib illustrates a concept described by Steve’s colleague at George Washington University, Steve Livingston, as the “impediment effect.” Livingston points out that “grisly” images can deeply affect public support for foreign conflicts. As a result, war planners try desperately to avoid those images, and foes try just as desperately to create them.

That’s why the American media withheld photos of dead GIs during World War II; why the image of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack undermined American support for the Vietnam War; why American journalists were kept away from the front during the first Persian Gulf war.

What’s new about Abu Ghraib, however, is that the repulsive pictures from inside those walls were not taken by a professional photographer, but by an outraged prison guard. All it took was a digital camera and an Internet connection, and his photos rocketed around the world.

Think about that for a second. One amateur, with the right tools in the right spot, could change world opinion. No wonder the president sounds baffled.