Our Beowulf Strategy

A millennium ago in the land of the Danes, a monster called Grendel, half-man, half-fiend, terrorized the population. Each night Grendel would emerge from his lair at the bottom of the lake, enter King Hrothgar’s hall, kill one or more of the king’s men or servants and carry them off to be eaten. After a particularly horrible event when Grendel killed thirty, the king called on Beowulf for assistance. Beowulf the Geat, the hero of a Germanic tribe in Sweden, came to their aid. In a mighty battle Beowulf mortally wounds Grendel and later kills the monster’s mother.

The Old English (tenth century) poem is about bravery in the face of immense odds, but also about those who are not brave. Prominent in the hymn of praise to the warrior is the voice of the king’s courtier Unferth, who dismisses Beowulf’s past exploits and asks the king to appease the monster rather than fight it. Unferth is filled with envy for a sort of bravery that is beyond his reach. The poet asks what is wrong with a man who will not render glory to the hero.

Most of us lack Beowulf’s bravery, but we honor it, or at least we used to. For two hundred years or more the citizen-soldiers of the United States fought wars to expand our dominion over the land between the oceans and other wars to defend the free world from totalitarianism. We were brave and undefeatable. We stood up to the German monster, the Japanese monster and the Soviet monster, among others, and fought until we were victorious. Many died.

There was always a class of Unferths who doubted our capacity and claimed that war is never the way to peace, when obviously it is frequently the only way. Not until Vietnam, however, did these antiwar courtiers led by John F. Kerry and Jane Fonda have their way.

We are now engaged in an existential struggle with the Islamist monster. The American Beowulf has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and defeated the Al Qaeda monster and the Sadaam Hussein military monster. In Iraq we are left with an insurgency that includes some Sunni foreign fighters and a large number of Iraqi Sunnis, many former Baath Party officials, who are unwilling to compromise with the ruling majority of Shiites and Kurds. On the other hand are the Shiite militias who are fighting the Sunnis on their own terms, unencumbered by the rules of engagement the US military imposes on itself and on the Iraqi military.

While Beowulf-like Americans debate the best strategy for victory, the Unferths among us (Kerry, Murtha, Pelosi, now even Hillary Clinton) call for appeasement, retreat and defeat.

I prefer the strategy for Iraq proposed by Robert Haddick a former Marine Corps infantry company commander who blogs at Westhawk. See “Mission Possible: How the U.S. Will Win in Iraq.”

So what should be the new U.S. strategy?

Politically, the U.S. should abandon reconciliation and put its full support behind the 80%+ Shiite/Kurdish majority. The U.S. State Department has proposed this course to the President.

Militarily, the U.S. should abandon counterinsurgency; the Sunni Arabs will not voluntarily be part of Shiite/Kurdish Iraq or its governance, thus they must logically be considered an enemy population.

What about tactics? In World War II, civilians were carpet-bombed or treated as refugees (note that there were no insurgencies after that war). The U.S. cannot do these things today. The U.S. cannot cut off electrical power to recalcitrant neighborhoods, or do mass preventive detentions, or tell an insurgent-supporting family that it has until dusk to get on a bus heading west to the Syrian border, never to return. But Iraq's army and police, facing an internal emergency, could do all of these things, and more.

Here is what the President should say in his next speech on Iraq:

Iraq is in a civil war. Baathists, ex-army officers, and Al Qaeda are trying to overthrow the elected Iraqi government. Because it is a civil war, the Iraqi government will decide for itself the best tactics, techniques, and procedures to defend itself and its constitution. The U.S. government will stand with its ally, the Iraqi government. The U.S. will immediately turn all Iraqi army and police units under its command over to the control of the Iraq government. Embedded U.S. teams will act as a liaison for logistics, intelligence, and fire support these Iraqi units may require. U.S. military units in Iraq will cease patrolling Iraq's cities and towns. The U.S. will transfer most of its forces currently in al-Anbar province and Baghdad to the Iraqi/Iranian border. U.S. military forces not necessary to protect Iraq's border or to support Iraqi forces in the civil war will exit Iraq.

Here at home we need a massive campaign to counteract the defeatist, blame America, anti-military, non-heroic attitudes that pervade our elite institutions and the Democratic Party.

We need to reinstate the American belief that the virtues of the heroic age are still necessary and that heroism is glorious, praiseworthy and self-evidently valuable. Whether we are warriors or mere citizens, we must overcome the wincey political correctness that hamstrings our efforts and support the war with all our might.

For an insightful look at how our educational institutions have contributed to the Unferthing of America, read The Politically Correct Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor.