Iraq:"No single narrative is sufficient"

Here's the truth:

"No single narrative is sufficient to explain all the violence we see in Iraq today.

I personally think Gen, Hayden is almost exactly the wrong person to be head of CIA for all kinds of reasons to do with his contempt for freedom. But I have to admit he's a bright guy. I think he has spotted something that should be in all the history books one day - that much of the mess in Iraq arises from a need for a single narrative. The plotline needs to go from A to B to C by easy steps and there should be no sidesteps to D. The good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black ones. If you aren't a designated bad guy then your hat is automatically at least off-white or you become an invisible extra. Other people are seen as a series of cardboard characters with no depth, no nuance and no human confusion in their minds. Nuance doesn't tell a good story, especially at the ballot box.

Thus in the beginning Iraq was divided into terrorists and freedom-lovers, then insurgent totalitarians and democratic voters, then saddamite Sunnis and pro-American everyone else, and finally real Iraqis and factionalist sectarians. Yet all of these, as well as criminal gangs, sufragette women, federalists, and the poor bloody citizenry pushed from pole to pole by the rest existed all along - and often one person was more than one of those at any given time.

Each time, a "plan" based on an arbitary division was put forward only to run headlong into the brick wall of the next bunch in black hats. The focus changed to fit the narrative and everything else was ignored as irrelevant while the new "plan" was pursued. Thus chaos was created because the real world doesn't easily fit narratives that divide the world bilaterally.

Attempting to describe the enemy, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the DIA director, listed "Iraqi nationalists, ex-Baathists, former military, angry Sunni, Jihadists, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda," who create an "overlapping, complex and multi-polar Sunni insurgent and terrorist environment." He added that "Shia militias and Shia militants, some Kurdish pesh merga, and extensive criminal activity further contribute to violence, instability and insecurity."

I think if Gen Maples asked many Iraqis, they would list all of those contributing to "violence, instability and insecurity" as the enemy - and include occupation troops and Iraqi security forces in that list. Maples definition of "the enemy", if it doesn't include everyone contributing violence, is just another attempt to impose a narrative of black hats vs. white hats. He doesn't even realize what he is saying, I feel:

Maples described the current situation as "mostly an intra-Arab struggle to determine how power and authority will be distributed," with or without the U.S. presence.

Hayden gets it right again:

"The longer this goes on, the less controlled the violence is, the more the violence devolves down to the neighborhood level," Hayden added. "The center disappears, and normal people acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists,"...Asked about the brazen kidnapping in Baghdad on Tuesday of some 100 employees in the Sunni-led Ministry of Education by an apparent Shiite group in commando uniforms using Interior Ministry vehicles, Hayden said the CIA station chief in Iraq said it showed that the battlefield "is descending into smaller and smaller groups fighting over smaller and smaller issues over smaller and smaller pieces of territory."

Even the common people become part of the problem, simply through the complexity of the ever-shifting chaos. Which is why those who insist on imposing some kind of bilateral narrative, be it Laura Rozen or Charles Krauthammer, get it so very and fundamentally wrong. They will always be behind the curve of actual events as they push their narrative until it is too obviously wrong, then switch to the next one and repeat the process. While the pundit and politico classes are writing their Hollywood-script versions - aimed at domestic voter consumption rather than accurate reflection - of who is to blame for the current depressing situation in Iraq and the prospect of that depressing situation spreading to engulf the entire region, they may want to look in a mirror.