Sun Tzu and America’s Way of War

by Jon Basil Utley, February 04, 2010

"....Following are some of Sun Tzu’s main maxims from The Art of War and how and why America breaks them:

"The best victory is to win without actually fighting. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting."

Americans instead want to start the fighting; there is little interest in winning without war.....

"Know thyself and know thy enemy. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

War for most Americas is sort of like a football game: one "wins" and then goes home. Knowing our own weaknesses, much less those of our enemy, is irrelevant for the war-wanters.....

"There is no instance of a country having benefited from a long war."

War is very profitable in America for all sorts of interests and careers.....

"Try to break up your enemy’s alliances."

Instead, America succeeds in agitating and killing disparate Muslims so that they unite against us, e.g., the Sunnis and Shi’ites and most of the Muslim world.....

"The best thing is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good."

Instead we turned Iraq into a broken nation......

"Empires are lost when inadequate men become leaders and wage war for base reasons or for no reason at all. "

King George lost his American colonies through stupid tax policies; World War I cost England, Austria, Russia, and Turkey their empires. George Bush’s war obviously fits.... "