Every picture, as they say, tells a story. In Vietnam the photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a highway in agony and fear, her body on fire after a napalm attack, had a devastating global impact that resonates three decades later.

The searing image shows with terrible intensity and simplicity how war maims and destroys innocent children. It forced the horror of Vietnam into people’s lives. There can hardly be a parent who has not gazed at that picture and not seen his or her own child running down the highway in Kim Phuc’s place.

Nick Ut’s famous photograph confirms the saying that one picture is worth 10,000 words. It is one of perhaps half a dozen Vietnam photographs that helped to galvanise anti-war sentiment in America, which in turn influenced US policy and led eventually to withdrawal.

These iconic pictures from Vietnam were all taken by brave professional photographers whose job it was to document war.

The photos published last week of British troops apparently abusing trussed-up Iraqi prisoners in Basra were also shocking, but they were taken by soldiers for their own amusement and were never meant for public consumption. Without the naivety of the soldier who took the film to be developed by a photographic shop in Britain they would never have seen the light of day. Appalled staff called the police.

There is another difference. John Keegan, the eminent war historian, is disturbed by the sexual element. Both in these photos and in those taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, captured Iraqis are depicted engaging in simulated sexual activity.

Keegan believes that the snapshots can be blamed on the rise and spread of video pornography among today’s soldiers. “It’s what the soldiers watch in the bar and barrack room that I think gave them the idea,” he said last week. “I can’t think where else they got it from.

“There have been pictures of atrocities in the past. There were horrifying ones of the Boxer rebellion, of beheaded Chinese. But I do not think you will find historical roots for what has been going on in Iraq.

“Why did both the Americans, then the British, turn up with the same sort of photos? Abu Ghraib and those by British soldiers we saw last week are highly similar. They were composed by the soldiers themselves, so where did they get the idea from? I think they got it from video pornography.”

For many, the soldiers’ snapshots have summed up the entire moral dilemma posed by the American and British invasion of Iraq. They have played into the hands of the anti-war lobby, which has seized upon them as evidence of a cancer within the military.

In fact they are nothing of the sort. They are combat souvenirs — sick totems of apparent manhood such as soldiers have brought back from wars for centuries. Unlike Kim Phuc’s napalm picture or any of Don McCullin’s great Vietnam work, they are not about human suffering in war. They are a glorification of war and of killing.

There are always soldiers who exult in the kill and keep mementos of their victims. I saw it myself all too frequently in Vietnam, where American troops revelled in posing for photographs with their buddies among heaps of mutilated corpses of Vietcong, and cut off their enemies’ ears as grisly souvenirs.

One GI, who collected ears from Vietcong he had killed, said he would show them off “in a way a fishermen posing for a photograph holds up a prize trout”.

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