And right now, they are completely consumed with continuing to wage this conventional offensive against the Shia forces arrayed against them. That is likely to remain their pre-occupation for some time to come. Somewhere down the road, they probably will begin to mount terrorist attacks against other countries from their secure areas in Iraq and Syria, precisely as the intelligence community warned. But that will be an adjunct to their waging of the new Iraqi civil war.
That is important because defining the Sunni militants as terrorists implies that they need to be attacked immediately and directly by the United States. Seeing them for what they are, first and foremost a sectarian militia waging a civil war, puts the emphasis on where it needs to be: finding an integrated political-military solution to the internal Iraqi problems that sparked the civil war. And that is a set of problems that is unlikely to be solved by immediate, direct American attacks on the Sunni militants. Indeed, such attacks could easily make the situation worse.
The Combatants, Part II: The Shia Coalition
A few points are also in order regarding the other side of the fight, the Shia.
Of greatest importance, we need to recognize that the Iraqi Security Forces are fast becoming little more than a Shia militia. This trend began 3-4 years ago when Prime Minister Maliki began to push Sunni and Kurdish officers out of the armed forces, to replace them with loyal Shia officers. As a result, even before the current debacle, the ISF had become far more Shia than it had been, with fewer and fewer Sunnis and Kurds. Even before the dramatic events of last week, most Sunnis and Kurds referred to the ISF as "Maliki's militia." Since last Tuesday, we have seen large numbers of Sunni Arab and Kurdish soldiers desert the ISF, leaving an even more homogeneously Shia force. There are still Sunnis and Kurds in the ranks and in the officer corps, but that seems likely to dissipate over time.
This is a trend that is common to these kinds of intercommunal civil wars. The "Syrian Armed Forces" of today are nothing more than the Asad regime's militia, heavily comprised of Alawis and other minorities aligned with the regime. All throughout the Lebanese civil war, there was an entity called "the Lebanese Armed Forces" (LAF) that wore the uniforms, lived on the bases and employed the equipment of Lebanon's former army. But they had become nothing but a Maronite Christian militia (after all of the Muslims and Druse deserted in the late 1970s), and their commanders nothing but Maronite Christian warlords. The same is already happening with the ISF and that trend is likely to continue.
This is important because one of the worst mistakes the United States made in the 1980s was to assume that the Lebanese Armed Forces were still a neutral, professional armed force committed to the security of the entire state. That was a key piece of the tragic U.S. mishandling of Lebanon. When the Reagan Administration intervened in Lebanon in 1983, one of its goals was shoring up the LAF so that it could stabilize the country. Everyone else in Lebanon-and the Middle East-recognized that the LAF had devolved into a Maronite militia and so they saw the U.S. intervention as the (Christian) United States coming to aid the (Christian) Maronite militia. That is why all of the other warring groups in Lebanon immediately saw the American forces not as neutral peacemakers, but as partisans-allies of the Maronites-and so started to attack our forces. It led directly to the Beirut barracks blast and the humiliating withdrawal of our troops.
There is the same danger in Iraq. If we treat the ISF as an apolitical, national army committed to disinterested stability in Iraq, and provide it with weapons and other military support to do so, we will once again be seen as taking a side in a civil war-even if we are doing so inadvertently, again. Everyone else, including our Sunni Arab allies, will see us as siding with the Shia against the Sunnis in the Iraqi civil war. That perspective will only be reinforced by the ongoing nuclear talks with (Shia) Iran. It is why any American military assistance to Iraq must be conditioned on concrete changes in Iraq's political structure to bring the Sunnis back in and limit the powers of the (Shia) prime minister, coupled with a thorough depoliticization of the ISF . That is the only way we may be able to convince the Sunnis that we have not simply taken the side of Maliki and the Iranians.
What happened to the ISF? Many have been asking what happened to the Iraqi Security Forces that brought them from the successes of 2007-2008 to the collapse of their units in northern Iraq last week. Obviously, a definitive answer to that question will only be provided by historians at some future date, but a number of factors have been known about the ISF for some time and these undoubtedly caused the collapse in part or whole.
First, it is important to recognize that the ISF built by the U.S. military in 2006-2009 had only very modest military capabilities (primarily in counterinsurgency/counterterrorism/population control operations). Throughout the modern era, Arab militaries have never achieved more than middling levels of military effectiveness and on most occasions, their performances were dreadful. Iraq was no exception. (Those looking for additional information on this may want to read the chapter on modern Iraqi military history in my book, Arabs at War.) This was largely a product of factors inherent in Arab culture, education and economics. With enormous exertions, a small number of Arab militaries overcame these problems to perform at a mediocre level. However, whenever Arab regimes politicized their armed forces to try to prevent a military coup against themselves, the performance of their armies dropped from bad to abysmal.
American military trainers and advisors were able to marginally improve the military effectiveness of the ISF by introducing rigorous, Western-style training programs and partnering closely with Iraqi forces in ways that allowed U.S. personnel to get to know their Iraqi counterparts. As a result of this familiarity, over the course of many months, the Americans figured out who were the good Iraqi soldiers and who were the bad. Who was connected to the terrorists or militias, who was connected to organized crime, who was smart and brave, who was lazy or cowardly. And the U.S. military then went about systematically promoting the best Iraqis, and pushing out the bad ones.
The greatest impact of these American efforts with the ISF in 2006-2009 were to depoliticize it, both to modestly increase its combat effectiveness and to make it professional, apolitical and therefore accepted as a stabilizing force by all Iraqis. Again, this was largely performed by promoting professional, patriotic Iraqi officers and removing the sectarian chauvinists. The U.S. also pressed Baghdad to accept more and more Sunni and Kurdish officers and enlisted personnel into the ranks. As a result, the ISF became a far more integrated force than it had been, led by a far more apolitical and nationalistic officer corps than it had been before. Indeed, in 2008, when Prime Minister Maliki sent heavily-Sunni brigades from Anbar down to Basra to fight the Shia militia, Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Shia of Basra welcomed the ISF brigades and fought against the Shia militiamen.
Unfortunately, despite the boost it gave him, Prime Minister Maliki saw this largely apolitical and professional military as a threat to himself. He feared that it was overrun by Ba'thists (he sees far too many Sunnis as closet Ba'thists), unwilling to follow his orders (despite the fact that it had always done so), and looking to oust him at the first excuse. So, beginning in 2009-2010, he began to remove the capable, apolitical officers that the United States had painstakingly put in place throughout the Iraqi command structure. Instead, he put in men loyal to himself, often because they had been the ones passed over or removed by the Americans. The result was a heavily politicized and far less competent officer corps.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Maliki's officers saw little need for the rigorous training programs the Americans had put in place. They closed many of the training facilities we built and allowed training to fall by the wayside. Not surprisingly, when these formations got into action again-both in some skirmishes with the Kurds and more bloody fights against Sunni militants-they did very poorly, undercutting morale.
Finally, beginning in 2011 immediately after the departure of the last American soldiers, Maliki began to use his new, politicized ISF to go after his political rivals, many of them leading (moderate) Sunni leaders. This was a critical element in his alienation of Iraq's Sunni community, and further demoralized the Sunni Arab, Kurdish, and other minority personnel in the ISF. It also disappointed many of the Shia soldiers and officers who preferred to be part of an apolitical, national military and had never wanted to become part of "Maliki's militia."
Not surprisingly, when this force came under tremendous stress, it fractured. As noted above, it is now being rebuilt, but not as a national army; as a Shia militia. And the U.S. should only be providing it with aid if we are given the right and the ability to turn it back into an apolitical, national army.
