James P. Pinkerton: Iraq narrative has familiar ring

The emerging narrative from Iraq is threefold, leading us to a further conclusion about the future of American politics. Hint: Watch Gen. David Petraeus.

Any narrative – the agreed-upon storyline – is a mixture of truth, fiction and poetry. In politics, narratives make sense of the past, guiding us into the future.

The first piece of the narrative is familiar from all our wars, won or lost: Our warriors did what we asked them to – and more. The Iraq war, as an overall crusade for democracy, might prove to be a disappointment, but Americans take pride in their military’s performance on the battlefield.

So politicians and pundits vie with each other to praise most highly our armed forces, seeking to match the poignancy at the tragic-heroic end of the 1954 Korean War movie “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” when the wise old admiral asks admiringly, “Where do we get such men?” Across the generations, nothing changes; Dana Perino, the new White House press secretary, came back from Iraq, declaring, “I am humbled by our troops.”

The second element of the narrative is that the Iraqis have let us down. Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman echoed Perino when he wrote of the Americans he met in Iraq: “We don’t deserve such good people.” But then Friedman said of the Iraqis, “If they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids,” they don’t deserve the help of Americans.

The same message was embraced in the wake of another painful war, Vietnam. In 1978, just three years after the fall of Saigon, “The Deer Hunter” offered a retrospective cinematic blessing to American GIs. We fought hard, the movie argued, but the Vietnamese were irredeemably awful, having nothing better to do than wager on sick games of Russian roulette. The movie was a hit, winning five Academy Awards, including best picture.

The third narrative component holds that Iraq is not a viable country. This was clear to me back in June 2003, when I traveled to Iraq and noted the Anglo-Saddam absurdity of the country’s “unity.” In recent years, other artificial countries – Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union – have broken up, to the benefit of their once-trapped populations.

So why not partition Iraq, too? As I wrote in a column more than four years ago, “ethnic and religious self-determination” for Iraqis is a better option than clinging “to borders drawn by long-dead colonialists.”

Indeed, a slow-motion division has been happening all along. The emblematic success of the Petraeus “surge” is the arming of local sheiks in Anbar province. But these empowered Sunni warlords are loyal to their own kind in their own place, not to the Shiite-controlled “national” government in Baghdad. Translation: Three Iraqs are coming – Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish.

Even neoconservatives are accepting the reality that Iraq will not be “whole and free.” Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, Charles Krauthammer described the sectarian splitting: “This radically decentralized rule is partition in embryo.”

Thus the narrative: The troops are great, the Iraqis are terrible, and Iraq wasn’t much of a country, anyway. So if the war didn’t work out – well, it’s not our fault. Critics will attack each element of this narrative, but politicians will embrace it. Why? Because that’s where the votes are, in agreeing to a storyline that gives Americans something honorable to hang on to.

And speaking of politics and votes, watch Petraeus, whom the White House obviously regards as its most credible advocate for the war, more so than George W. Bush.

Monday, Petraeus praised the troops and distanced himself from the Iraqis – just what Americans want to hear.

And the Los Angeles Times recently compared Petraeus to Ulysses S. Grant, the Northern hero of the Civil War. Grant was hated by many Americans, and yet in 1868, the Republican was elected to the presidency.