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.