A nation must think before it acts.
News pictures can be problems for modern statesmen. As then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher once declared, ‘‘Television images cannot be the North Star of America’s foreign policy.’’ Updating this lament for the age of pixels and the Internet, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently complained to Congress, ‘‘We’re functioning with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they have not even arrived in the Pentagon.’’