Christopher Bellamy: Allies struggle in the fight to win hearts and minds

So, we have an "operational pause" in the Iraq conflict. But the conclusion that this war is going to last longer than many people, including the troops committed, were led to expect, is proving hard to resist.

Planners have admitted, in private they did not know exactly what was going to happen, so it is no surprise that the plan may have to be reworked. And whatever the spin the US and British governments put on it, Iraqi resistance has been quite a bit tougher than most people had expected. The US Lt-Gen William Wallace, whose name has interesting historical parallels, has been widely reported as saying this was "not the enemy we war-gamed against". We have to ask: why not?

The appearance of suicide bombers has probably been the single greatest upset to US and British calculations. Again, we have to ask: why? The Allies' aim was to "liberate the Iraqis and win hearts and minds". The suicide bomber puts a flaming armoured wall between the security forces, who may be trying to be as reassuring and pleasant as possible, and just about everyone else they encounter. Some 99 per cent of the local people and benign foreigners, such as journalists, probably want to be nice to the self-styled "liberators" as well, but you can't take the risk.

The British and American troops will undoubtedly have to modify the way they handle approaching cars, people with their hands up and the conduct of searches. They can do that, and modern technology might help. But the atmosphere will become more charged and the process more time-consuming as the conflict continues.

"Know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be in danger" – another timeless aphorism from General Sun-Tzu, in fourth-century BC China. The failure to anticipate the appearance of suicide bombers – hardly unknown in the Middle East – reflects a wider failure to understand Sun-Tzu's seminal observation.

A really key, crass and totally avoidable omission is the lack of Arabic speakers and translators in the combat zone. One in four soldiers has a translation guide, although few are likely to be able to use it well. If you are trying to win "hearts and minds", you have to speak the local language.

The Americans showed their arrogance early on by referring to the proposed operation as a "crusade". But this war has clearly been in the offing for years and planned for months. It would not have been hard to pick one smart officer or NCO from each platoon and put them on a two-month Arabic course. Compared with the cost of weaponry, that would have been a negligible cost. In the Second World War, all the combatants had plenty of people who spoke their opponents' languages and spent months or even, in the case of the Japanese, years training translators and interpreters. Has the conceit of the English-speaking world really reached such dizzying heights?

The Iraqis are fighting clever. A spokesman for the Iraqi Information Ministry yesterday morning said "the British are the Condottieri of this century". Condottieri were 15th-century Italian "soldiers of fortune". Mercenaries have a long and respectable tradition in military history. More than ten years ago, in an article in International Affairs, I suggested that, in the new world order, UK forces might become the "soldiers of fortune" of the international community. I meant the international community as represented by the UN, not the United States.

There was another Iraqi statement, too, that they would not leave the bodies of dead Allied troops lying but would bury them "in accordance with their religious principles". That is absolutely correct, under the Geneva Convention, if the locations are identified in such a way that the bodies can be recovered subsequently. In the current climate, I would not be surprised if someone takes offence at that Iraqi statement. But why? That is what we do with their dead.

"Know your enemy and know yourself." That is the lesson some Allied leaders seem to have forgotten.

Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University