Woops.

Argument "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?