Much like Richard Delevan and others, I've been very much impressed with Barack Obama. He's spectacularly articulate and, I hear, has a spot of the Clintons about him (the good bits).

At the same time, I can't help but be disturbed at his line on Iraq. I'm disturbed, in a sense, by what Obama's rhetoric says about how Americans might remember this war once they leave.

Mel Dubnick, along with Kathe Callahan and Dorothy Olshfski, published a paper at the end of last year on 'war narratives' (summary here) where they argued that part of the problem with Bush's Iraq strategy is that it always lacked a coherent narrative. That is, there was no single way in which the US invasion of Iraq was articulated and understood. Dubnick et al argue that other wars in US history were rooted in a coalescing around a story about the war and why the war was happening. The implicit conclusion is that, without a narrative about the war, support was always going dissipate.

What troubles me about Obama's line on Iraq is that it actually draws on an evolving war narrative that, though it may not keep the US in Iraq (beyond Bush's bizarre and self-serving attempt to bomb the Iraqi people into gratitude), will almost certainly be the narrative pushed when the bull finally leaves the china shop.

That is, that Iraq's problem is that they have developed a little dependency culture in response to the US occupation. Just like a social welfare office for the poor, so the story goes, the Iraqi government doesn't feel the need to get up of it's ass when the Americans are in the neighbourhood cleaning up the mess. A mess, by the way, that doesn't seem to have anything to do with, oh I don't know, the invasion.

So, as the narrative goes, a bit of tough love is needed. Obama wants 'no more coddling, no more equivocation.' The Iraqis need to fix their own problems and American intervention only serves to convince them that someone else will be around to pick up the pieces of their failures.

Of course, this is the story a lot of people in the States told and tell about Vietnam. There was a civil war and we did our best to preserve freedom, or keep order, and we lost because we couldn't get the support from the Vietnamese people and/or the American public. When in fact a more accurate appraisal would be that the Americans inherited France's imperial war, weighed in on the side of the compradors and lost.

When it comes to the Iraqi-dependency-culture story, a second narrative is mixed in with the Vietnam one. That is the one used about African wars (as documented in Berkeley's The Graves are not Yet Full) and the conflict in Ireland: that is, that civil wars are a result of 'ancient tribal hatreds,' not contemporary political forces. So, 'Iraq is descending into chaos based on ethnic divisions that were around long before American troops arrived' (here).

The underpinning of this narrative is that the US is helpless and passive in the face of Iraqi chaos. Sending in more troops, for Obama, will only lead to more deaths without actually getting to grips with the stubborn problem because, at the end of the day, there is no way you can get to grips with ancient ethnic hatreds and dependency.

I should say that I'm writing all this in an ideas-of-my-own vacuum: Bush is obviously going to fail, but with a more impressive death-toll than he is already responsible for. So, ultimately, a 'draw-down' of troops will be the way to go. So I'm with Obama on substance. On rhetoric, though, I'm depressed. Here's how I see the narrative coalescing in the future. Here's where Obama and Bush will, despite themselves, agree: America will leave Iraq because the Iraqi government/people were not willing to support American efforts on their behalf. Their fine mess will be all their own and the lessons of this high-handed, arrogant and incompetent invasion will not be learned.