Peter Wall: Being seen as another regime is the last thing we want, says the Model of a Modern Major General

Six foot three in his desert boots, Peter Wall is – literally – the Very Model of a Modern Major-General. He may not, as the chorus of The Pirates of Penzance has it, be able to write a washing bill in Babylonian cuneiform, but he will be about as well placed as anyone in the British Army to learn.

For, while he leaves US Central Command in Qatar for London this week, he will return to the Middle East and Iraq next month as the incumbent of one of the toughest and most uncharted overseas jobs any public servant can imagine. Officials wince if you suggest he will return as military governor of south-eastern Iraq but, as the new GOC 1st Armoured Division, he will assume responsibility for security in the province of Basra and probably Maysan to the north.

However, before we talk about the future, in front of a large map of the area in his office among the network of hangars and steel containers that make up the secret inner sanctum of Centcom, we talk about the immediate past.

As second-in-command of British forces, he says he and his colleagues have learnt a lot about "our ability to fit in to a coalition as a second partner but with an undoubted ability to influence the campaign plan". That had been "essential" to make sure the campaign "evolved down tracks which are consistent with the UK's own policy goals". These, he says with some delicacy, "have not always been absolutely synonymous with other people's".

They have included the UK's role in seeking to ensure that using targeted bombing raids conforms with international law. But there had also been "cases where we may have a slightly different approach. You saw some of this coming through in the approach that was taken to the operation in Basra, where we were keen to afford ourselves time for the UK approach to bear fruit, which it did."

The much-praised handling of Basra – with nearly a fortnight's careful pause to minimise civilian as well as military casualties – had begun with "the regime scoring quite a few hits on the coalition in the early days of the campaign." The British had been initially prepared for a desert fight with conventional forces. What they hadn't at first bargained for was the extent to which the regime would deliberately use Basra as a stronghold for the plainclothes and irregular forces which harrassed British forces.

So had the British commanders been under pressure to go in earlier than they did to demonstrate a spectacular victory? If there is a story to tell, we may have to wait for many years to hear it. All he will say is: "I think there was always a supposition that we might have done. There was a media expectation that the regime was going to be toppled very quickly when the regime was capable of inflicting a little bit of damage on coalition pride if not on coalition combat power."

So the question inevitably loomed of whether "we were going to have to conduct this fight much more viciously than we originally anticipated, bearing in mind that this mission was about liberation. And I think it quickly became apparent that that time would be afforded to allow commanders to do things in the way they felt best."

Some "very ferocious fighting" with the irregulars had been experienced which had been "dealt with extremely robustly". Would the irregulars regroup and perhaps return post-regime? "There is a prospect at any time of disenchanted people mounting attacks, either speculatively or more concertedly, against coalition forces. We're certainly not complacent... A phenomenal amount of weapons [are also] out there and it would be very rash to assume that there aren't some people who are motivated to generate some form of backlash." He doesn't expect this to be large or "particularly well-organised", but "we certainly expect it to manifest itself occasionally and our forces will be on their guard."

But if irregulars like the Fedayeen are as unideological as the British military insists they are, what would be their motivation? "It is essentially their low status in society, their lack of alternative outlet for their energies and the fact that they have been paid large amounts of money and afforded privileges they wouldn't otherwise have had."

The hope is that, in the long run, Iraqi society will evolve in a way that will give the irregulars a more benign destiny. But "in the immediate short term there could well be a legacy". This will be dealt with whatever "slightly different" rules of engagement will apply post-war.

As for prisoners-of-war, he says: "We may be holding people who have all sorts of misdemeanours to account for." But with a firm emphasis on international legality he promises that irregular POWs will be channelled towards proper legal and criminal proceedings – no whisper here of Guantanamo-type solutions – as long as it's a matter for military and not political decisions made elsewhere.

Maj-Gen Wall is sombre when asked about the deaths of British soldiers in friendly fire, including from US forces. Yes, there had to be attempts to improve procedures. But war is not a "zero-defect" operation and preventing friendly fire is not just the technical challenge of improving high-tech recognition equipment – "there is no technical panacea" – but also an "inter-service, international" problem "particularly in the coalition environment". It is "hellish difficult" to solve, "just like any other inter-agency process."

So what of the – much debated in London – suggestion that British forces are better and more restrained at dealing with warfare than the Americans? And especially dealing with warfare in which civilians and pseudo-civilians are in the front line, for example at checkpoints of the sort where US forces killed civilians?

After a long pause, Maj-Gen Wall says: "I think we have had significant opportunities over a protracted period – two or three military generations – both in the UK and overseas in the final decades of empire, to balance the kinetic effects available to us from our weaponry with other control mechanisms. One of the reasons why we have learned these lessons is that we have learned from mistakes we have made in the past. We are all conscious that ... those opportunities have given us a slightly more measured approach in certain circumstances."

Hadn't the conventional wisdom been that you would need more Allied troops to keep the peace than to make the war? And wasn't this underlined by the looting, revenge attacks and political instability that had developed? Yes, that had been the view, he says, but while it was "very early days", encouraging signs were rapidly developing in Basra at least that it might have been pessimistic. While it would take time for the old Iraqi professional middle-class fully to re-emerge, he says, enterprising people were already beginning to take responsibility – despite the "significant gaps", like the absence of a judiciary and, so far, a viable police force.

The stronger their ability to take responsibility, he says, the stronger will be their resentment at military intervention where it is not needed. And one of the tricks will be to call that correctly because there will be some areas where they may wish to use the military in the short term as a "handrail" and others where they would rather not. "The last thing we want to appear to be is another regime."

On looting, reportedly abating in Basra, he says this: "Everyone is watching intently to see how the military interacts with civilians. The last thing we would wish to get involved in is any tendency towards over-regulation or heavy-handedness that would deprive them of basic freedom. You have to strike a delicate balance." However, he added, "there is some pretty unseemly stuff going on."

A high-flier, Maj-Gen Wall knows he has a hugely difficult task on his hands. But he has had such challenges before – not least in the Balkans. It is unusual for a specialist Royal Engineers officer to assume an overall command as high as his. "To do that you have to convince people you understand all their problems and can deal with them," one military official said. After years of repression, the impoverished people of south-eastern Iraq will be hoping that he can do some of the same for them.