Lies, damn lies and military briefings in Doha

Nobody tells the truth in war. But the difference between democracies and dictatorships should be that the former tell more than the latter.

Last Monday evening, General John Abizaid walked on to the famous $250,000 set in the briefing room at US Central Command in Qatar and stunned his news-hungry audience by giving them a glimpse of what was really happening in the unpredictable and already bloody war which yesterday came to the heart of civilian Baghdad.

Lieutenant-General Abizaid, Number Two to Tommy Franks, is an interesting man; not only does he have, as a veteran of the last Gulf War, an impeccable record as a soldier's soldier. Of Lebanese descent, he also speaks Arabic and has a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard. This is a man who, in stark contrast to most of his colleagues, can actually pronounce the names of Iraqi towns.

And he seems a little more resistant than his immediate boss to versions of the the politician speak in which Geoff Hoon blithely announced yesterday that Saddam Hussein had effectively lost control of southern Iraq. It is unlikely to feel like that in Basra. Or the sotto voce spin that told you in the early days that those who reported setbacks were missing the bigger, more benign, picture.

It wasn't that General Abizaid was any less robust than his colleagues. He confronted the al-Jazeera reporter at the news conference, for example, over the station's "unacceptable" use of the Iraqi TV footage of US PoWs. It was rather that he broke what was then new ground by making not the slightest effort to disguise the level of resistance encountered by US at the crucial Euphrates crossing point of Nasiriyah, and by giving some factual details of the US casualties – including those suffered by a supply convoy unused to combat – and how they happened on this "toughest day" of the war so far.

In this respect, General Abizaid's handling of Monday's press conference was unusual. Contrast Brigadier-General Vince Brooks's uninformative stonewalling on the Baghdad market bomb yesterday when, after some softball questions, the first reporter actually asked about it. As well as being more enlightening than all the clinical images of precision bombing on the Centcom plasma screens, Abizaid was almost certainly tactically right. For the overambitious official reporting of the battlefield can unravel all too quickly in an age of in the age of instant wall-to-wall coverage.

Two of the most obvious examples in the British field of operations were the "securing" of Umm Qasr, announced on a virtually daily basis until, on Tuesday, it did finally seem to have happened, if not to perfect safety, and the fate of the 51st Iraqi division. On Saturday Mr Hoon bluntly stated that it had "stopped" fighting, while the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said without qualification that it had "surrendered." Yet on Tuesday night we learned that elements of the division were back and at war in Basra.

Of course, if soldiers don civilian clothes and melt away to their homes, it can be difficult to know what they intend, or whether they are vulnerable to intimidatory pressure to start fighting again. But what this episode shows is that to err on the side of caution is wise, as well more respectful of the truth. For if you run ahead of the proven facts, trust will be all the less next time. People will wonder – albeit unfairly – what really happened in Basra on Tuesday evening, when the only sources for reports of an uprising appear to be the allied military.

This is particularly true now that several of the pre-war conventional wisdoms, from the weather to the nature of the Iraqi dictatorship, have had to be revised. For when that happens you begin to wonder what else you are missing. We knew, or thought we knew, that the weather was a problem, and that if the war was left too long it might become too hot to fight in the desert. We didn't quite realise how serious the sandstorms could be.

Then there's the issue of the coherence of the Baath regime. When asked about the possibility that Saddam Hussein was dead, allied politicians (and generals) have repeatedly said that this is not about one man, but about a regime. Yet such was the demonisation of the Iraqi dictator, justified in moral terms though it was, that most voters in the US and Britain almost certainly thought it was about one man, and that without him the Baathist regime would not be coherent enough to stay in being.

Above all there was the nostrum, fostered at least as much by the commentariat as by the politicians, that the war would be "the easy part" and that the "real" problem would be the one of post-war reconstruction. Yes, the latter problem is huge enough. At least one purpose of Tony Blair's journey to Washington yesterday was surely to try to persuade the US administration that the UN has to be central to post-war Iraq. This ranges from oil – on which the Prime Minister appears not to have got the guarantees of a UN trust fund he sought in the Azores – to the question of who will be in control of the humanitarian aid efforts, with the NGOs still fearful that they will be in the unpalatable and dangerous position of acting as agents for a US-run operation. But, crucially, the war has to be won first, and you don't have to be a doomsayer, or even doubt an eventual allied victory, to realise that this is a tougher proposition than many people chose to believe before it started.

But General Abizaid also lifted the lid just briefly on the inevitable gulf between the soldier's war and the politician's war. This isn't just a matter of the natural pressure from governments for results, or the growing debate over strategy. It was Donald Rumsfeld, after all, who rejected the "overwhelming force" plan by the soldiers' politician, Colin Powell, in favour of the strategy of bombing, joint army-marine operations and the use of special forces. You could see on television on Tuesday night the strains of the soldier's war etched on the face of a haggard Colonel Chris Vernon when, the deaths of four British soldiers foremost in his mind, he blew apart the notion that the 51st division was no longer in business and went on to describe the fearful and inscrutable mood of the people of Basra. As well they might be, given the US abandonment in 1991 of the uprising by Shia southern Iraq they themselves had called for.

And you could even see it when a senior British officer good-humouredly alluded in private to the pressure from Washington and London to bring the humanitarian aid ship RFA Galahad into Umm Qasr, and pointed out that the waters outside the port were still being swept for mines, adding with masterly understatement "It's important to get Galahad in to port but its also important to ensure it isn't blown up before it gets there."

Nobody tells all the truth in war. But the difference between democracies and dictatorships should be that the former tell more of it than the latter. And what's becoming clear is that the best and most credible uniformed spokesmen here at Centcom are the most purely military and the least political; the ones like Brigadier Peter Wall, another second in command, who most realistically reflect the problems and predicaments of the war and, in doing so, do the most justice to the bravery of the troops in the field, the men and women upon whom the completion of the hugely dangerous task they have been set by the politicians now depends. What's worrying, therefore, is that General Abizaid hasn't been seen in public since Monday night. It's time to bring him back.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk