As the battle rages in Falluja there is one certainty: this is not the war the US-led coalition had in mind when the decision was taken to topple Saddam Hussein. Nor is the insurgency merely an "insurrection" against foreign occupation. Rather, it is the kind of guerrilla war apparently planned from the moment the US threatened to invade. Yet none of the various investigations in the US and elsewhere into the conduct of the war in Iraq has touched the core issue of the nature of the war itself.

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion, coalition military planners and political analysts imagined that Mr Hussein was either sitting in one of his palaces doing nothing or that he was preparing to fight a full-frontal, conventional war battle that everyone knew he would lose in the face of superior western firepower. The only questions were how long it would take and how many casualties there would be. So when the Iraqi army apparently disintegrated and the famed Republican Guard and other elite formations failed to engage the invading forces, it was widely seen as proof of Mr Hussein's resounding defeat.