Since I must write this article some days before it is published, I am not in the best position to be making predictions about something that will be moving quite as rapidly as the war in Iraq. However, I think I can make two claims quite safely.

First, the war to this point will have been characterised more by defections from Iraqi forces than by hard fighting.

Second, al-Qaeda forces will not have been able to mount the large-scale `sympathy' attack against Americans outside Iraq that many feared they would.

Taking the last point first, although preparation for war in Iraq has pushed it out of the spotlight somewhat, the international effort against al-Qaeda has enjoyed such success in the last few weeks that it is almost possible to think in terms of its back having been broken.

The chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter Goss (himself a former CIA case officer), told the Washington Post this week that "I believe the tide has turned in terms of al-Qaeda. We're at the top of the hill."

"For the first time," he said, "they have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them."

Other intelligence officials agree with him, although they caution that there is no certainty they will be able to disrupt attacks already set in motion by al-Qaeda or other affiliated groups. They say they are still concerned about possible bombings and attacks, although on a smaller scale than those mounted against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

The reason the turnaround has gathered such momentum has undoubtedly been the arrest of al-Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Shaik Mohammed in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, on March 1. That arrest, intelligence sources say, cut off the organisation's key operational leader from followers poised to execute attacks.

And the cache of computer and paper files found in the house in which Shaik Mohammed was living has turned out to be "a mother lode" of information. It has provided hundreds of leads about the organisation's infrastructure. In addition, Shaik Mohammed has himself been providing information to the CIA since his arrest. Some of it is not verifiable, but some concerns what one official described as "things we didn't know and are very glad we know now".

On the very morning that US forces began their operation against Iraq, others in Afghanistan began a large-scale operation in a mountainous region in the south eastern part of the country, near Kandahar, the former spiritual headquarters of the Taliban.

It was the biggest operation mounted to hunt for members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network for more than a year. Is it connected to the intelligence found in Shaik Mohammed's arrest? No one has yet confirmed that, but it is known that some of the intelligence seized had to do with the locations of Osama bin Laden and the elusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar, so it would not be a surprise if there was a connection.

World-wide, it seems, al-Qaeda operatives are now rather more concerned about saving their own skins than they are with mounting attacks.

The rate of defection that I predict in Iraq has to do with their recent bitter experience, certainly, but also with the quality of Iraqi soldiers, which is much like the quality of other Arabic-speaking soldiers - very low. The Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis and others all have an extremely poor record on the battlefield. The small Israeli army has been able to defeat the combined forces of Arab nations in the Middle East soundly on more than one occasion during the last half century or so.

This is not a comment on a race of people, but rather on aspects of Middle Eastern culture and society that have a negative impact on their performance as soldiers.

There are many such factors - a soldier's education, the quality of his training, the ethos into which he was born, the conditions of his life as a soldier, the extent to which he is able to use his own talents, the support he is given by his unit, and so on.

Many people feel the British have the best regular soldiers in the world, and that two factors, particularly, are key in making that the case. The first is the Regimental system, in which the soldier is encouraged to feel a part of a supportive family with a proud record of bravery and feats of arms that can be added to, but not subtracted from. The second is that personal initiative is highly prized and rewarded in British units. The ability to take part in making decisions is pushed down to the lowest level possible, giving every soldier the opportunity to affect, and therefore have a personal stake in, the quality of the plan that is to govern his actions.

Regular American soldiers, while better-equipped, are held back a little by their system, in which there is more centralisation of command and in which units at Regimental level have much less opportunity to assert their own identity and influence.

I stress these are regular soldiers. With special forces, the distinctions are not at all as easy to make.

But if the British and US armies are at the top of some kind of scale, Arabic-speaking soldiers are at its bottom. They suffer from chronic over-centralisation of command, from rigid disincentives to initiative, from lack of flexibility and from the discouragement of leadership qualities at the junior officer level.

Their training tends to be unimaginative. Arab educational systems rely on rote memorisation, and therefore there is a heavy over-reliance on the lecture-from-on-high method of teaching.

Competition is discouraged, because it produces winners on the one hand, but badly-humiliated losers on the other. Foreign military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn quickly, before directing any question to a student in a classroom, particularly an officer, to make sure that the student actually does know the answer.

There is a highly-accentuated class system in all Middle Eastern countries that also has a bad effect in the soldiering business. In Middle Eastern societies, there tend to be two social classes, rich upper class and poor lower class, with very little in between. Their armed forces tend to follow the same design - upper class officers, lower class soldiers, and almost no non-commissioned officers. Any soldier will tell you that an army without NCOs is as awkward as a car with only one gear.

The distinction in the Middle East between officer and private soldier is fairly extreme. I read of an occasion recently when, during a sandstorm in Egypt, a contingent of soldiers was formed up standing in single file for the purpose of protecting a small group of visitors from windblown sand. During the Gulf War, to give another example, a severe windstorm blew down tents that housed Iraqi officers. They spent three days in the wind and rain rather than allow themselves to be seen by nearby enlisted prisoners to be working with their hands.

The idea of officers taking care of their men is not popular. It is not unusual that on weekends, for example, officers stationed with their men out in the country leave them, on Friday nights, to fend for themselves until Monday morning.

It is better for officers not to rock the boat in any way. Anyone conspicuously taking the initiative condemns himself as someone who cannot be trusted. In a system in which command is exercised from on high, this can mean a quick end to what might in any sensible system be a promising career.

It is worth mentioning, too, the inability of soldiers in this kind of system to maintain equipment well. US and European weapons systems are generally designed with the concept of repair at a low level in mind. Middle Eastern armies seem unable to deal with the delegation, tool allocation, sense of unit responsibility and, perhaps most of all, the trust that is implied by that kind of system. Complaints that US and European weaponry is "too delicate" are common in the Middle East, and generally stem from that failure.

Soldiers in Middle Eastern armed forces generally dislike their service intensely. Often, only the pressure of harsh economic reality keeps them from desertion.

The very aggressive Allied forces campaign that has been going on for some time now to persuade Iraqi officers and servicemen to give up, to surrender to forces that will feed, clothe, pay and protect them, therefore, should fall on highly fertile ground.

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