Is killing ISIS leader a good idea?

Editor's note: Robert Baer is a CNN national security analyst, a former CIA operative and author of "The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins." The views expressed are his own.

CNN -- It's a good bet that right now, someone somewhere in Washington has come up with a plan to decapitate the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by assassinating its boss, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and moving down through his lieutenants.

Argued in hushed tones over a polished conference table, I have no doubt this sounds like a no-lose proposition (and certainly a better alternative to invading Iraq and Syria). But if ISIS is in essence al Qaeda 2.0, then it is hard not to see the assassination of Osama bin Laden as having had very mixed results -- and as holding some important lessons for U.S. policy makers.

The fact is that assassinations are, at best, tricky -- the cure can be worse than the disease. And a cure is almost certain to fail when you have absolutely no idea what the disease is that you're treating.

It may comfort us to dismiss ISIS as a group of bloodthirsty terrorists doomed to collapse under their own psychosis and violence. But while ISIS does of course employ terror as a tactic, getting hung up on the word "terror" causes us to miss a more critical truth: that ISIS is a straight-line manifestation of an aggrieved religious sect -- orthodox Sunni Islam. And it's becoming more apparent by the day that a lot of Sunni Muslims believe they're on the losing end of history, and that if they don't hit back, things will get a lot worse.

Indeed, Sunnis, despite making up the large majority of Muslims globally, haven't fared well in recent times. The 2003 invasion of Iraq dispossessed the Sunnis in that country of both their power and wealth. Insult was added to injury when the United States handed power over to a sectarian Shia government bent on revenge against the Sunnis.

ISIS allegedly using poison gas Chambliss: Killing ISIS 'only' option Female Peshmerga on the front lines We can go on all we like about democracy and the rule of law, but the way the Sunnis view it is that we wantonly empowered their Shia rivals. Sunnis aren't doing much better anywhere else. The minority Alawite regime in Syria -- the Alawites are a Shia offshoot -- continues to slaughter large numbers of Sunnis. Another Shia offshoot sect in Yemen recently took over Sana, the capital. And for the last decade, the American drone campaign over Pakistan's tribal belt has never let up, "breaking the back" of al Qaeda and the Taliban.We may dismiss them as terrorists, but for a small but growing number of Sunnis they're the closest thing they have to a resistance group. Even in solidly Sunni Egypt, the military is doing its best to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, the beating heart of political Sunni Islam.
An international aid worker who's negotiated with ISIS on hostage releases recently told me that militant Muslims look at their predicament in the starkest of existential terms, namely that that the United States is out to destroy Islam. They're convinced the U.S. deliberately caused the death of 300,000 Muslims in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and in retaliation for 9/11, and that it won't stop until the Sunnis start to fight back.