US needs Sun Tzu strategy to deal with IS

Why dwell on this in dealing with IS group?

Because dealing with the IS group requires Americans to think like Sun Tzu, not like Clausewitz: To focus on the broader, non-military aspects of war and the strategic framework far more than the tactical nuts and bolts that Americans have always been so good at. The US also has to abandon former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell's famous slogan, "We broke it, so we must fix it."

That can apply in some cases but not all.

And it is clear, the more we try to fix our messes in the Middle East, the more we make them worse. Wherever we destroy existing state structures in the Middle East in the name of "supporting; human rights and democracy", we simply open the way for extremists to take over. This has happened in Gaza, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Wherever we forced previously effective Arab governments to "democratize", American-style, it was never secular moderate, middle-class democrats who took over. It's been IS, al-Qaida, or the Muslim Brotherhood every time.

The US doesn't need another cycle of hyper-activity and direct military action in the Middle East (the punch-'em-on-the-nose Clausewitzian solution). It needs to learn from Sun Tzu and the legendary hero of the Roman Republic Fabius Maximus Cunctator (Fabius the Delayer). It needs to end the witless policy George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their neoconservatives injected into the region.

The author is chief global analyst for the Globalist and a senior fellow of the American University in Moscow.