By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 9, 2003; Page A01

The movements of U.S. tanks and other armored vehicles into downtown Baghdad this week have been far more aggressive than senior defense officials suggested just a short time ago and reflect mounting intelligence from U.S. Special Forces operating in the city that the Iraqi government is teetering, defense officials said yesterday.

At the same time, defense analysts said, the fierce urban battles between U.S. Army troops and Marines and Iraqi soldiers and irregular forces are coming at the price of a growing toll on civilian life and property that is at odds with the Bush administration's broader political objective of winning the support of the Iraqi people and the Arab world.

The risks inherent in the U.S. strategy to pressure the Iraqi capital's defenders by sending M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles through the streets were manifest throughout the day yesterday. A U.S. airstrike hit the office of the Middle East satellite news network al-Jazeera, killing one staff member, and a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, where hundreds of foreign journalists -- many of them Americans -- are staying. Two foreign journalists were killed in the attack.

Destroying al-Jazeera's office, said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, could cause as much negative fallout in the Middle East as the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo air war in 1999 did in China. "The Chinese got over it in a couple of years," he said. "I'm not sure the Arabs will forgive us so fast."

But defense officials stood by their tactics. While Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal expressed "condolences" to civilians and "journalists in particular" killed in the fighting, he and other officials said they were seeking to hasten the Iraqi government's downfall by isolating its military and demonstrating to the Iraqi people that U.S. forces could operate with impunity in the city.

"The coalition continues to exert pressure on the regime and on the forces that remain willing to fight for the regime," Army Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Small formations of Iraqi fighters, some wearing uniforms, some in civilian clothes, continue to mount resistance in pockets. They are using office buildings, residential areas and parks as cover in ways that make it hard at times for U.S. forces to tell exactly who is shooting at them.

The Iraqis mounted a spirited counterattack yesterday, sending dozens of buses, trucks and BMP armored personnel carriers over bridges across the Tigris River in eastern Baghdad. They were repulsed by the 3rd Infantry Division on the western side. But U.S. defense officials maintained that the Iraqi government and military leadership were losing their grip on the city.

The leadership structure "has been fragmented" and its ability to communicate instructions to forces "has been disrupted," Brooks said. At the Pentagon, McChrystal told reporters that "the Republican Guard are receiving instructions but in many cases not following them and not capable anymore, so they're not an effective fighting force."

The U.S. battle plan in Baghdad, McChrystal said, is to destroy whatever ability the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein still has in controlling the Special Republican Guard, Special Security Organization and irregular forces. U.S. forces have demonstrated "extraordinary restraint" in seeking to avoid civilian casualties, he said, despite having "fought their way across Iraq through a number of Republican Guard divisions."

McChrystal added, however, that U.S. forces' first obligation is to protect their own lives and those of their fellow soldiers. Alluding to military assertions -- which were disputed by journalists at the Palestine Hotel -- that a U.S. tank fired a shell into the upper floors of the building only after coming under fire, McChrystal said: "When they are fired at, they have not only the right to respond, they have the obligation to respond to protect the soldiers with them and to accomplish the mission at large."

"There's nothing sacrosanct about a hotel with a bunch of journalists in it," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor.

But the Bush administration is apparently paying a high price in Arab public opinion for the military's tactics.

At a news conference at al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, executives called Tareq Ayyoub, their correspondent killed in the U.S. airstrike yesterday, a "martyr" and demanded a full investigation by the U.S. military. Ayyoub's wife, Dima Tahboub, spoke to reporters by telephone from Amman, Jordan, and said, at one point, "Who's committing terrorism now?"

Since seizing Saddam International Airport in Baghdad Friday, the 3rd Infantry Division has made increasingly bold forays into the center of the city that have resulted in clashes with Iraqi forces in densely populated areas. The tactic appears to be more aggressive than signaled earlier by senior defense officials.

"We are certainly not going to do anything to put our young men and women in danger precipitously. We're also not going to put Iraqi civilians in danger, as well. So we'll be patient and we'll just continue to draw the noose tighter and tighter," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on March 30.

Daniel Plesch, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, an independent British think tank on defense issues, said the U.S. approach appeared to be causing unnecessary casualties. "U.S. forces lack fire discipline," he said. This has been demonstrated, he said, not only in the high number of casualties inflicted by the Army in its raids through downtown Baghdad but also in "friendly fire" incidents earlier in the war. Of the 26 British military fatalities in the war thus far, three have been inflicted by U.S. forces.

Although the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad is unknown, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday that hospitals were overwhelmed and running short of supplies.

A U.S. Army general said the British forces operating in Basra in southern Iraq have tended to be more careful about inflicting civilian casualties than U.S. troops and Marines.

"My impression is that they are much more sensitive to the fact that the fight is about the population in the cities, not the enemy forces in the city," he said. "Americans tend to see the fight as a medieval clash of the titans, with the population on the sidelines, while the British view it as a fight between two sides for the support of the people."

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Terry Scott, former commander of Army Special Operations, said that U.S. forces must be mindful that it could be possible to "win all the battles and still lose the war -- and I think that's an important issue now, because we're talking about such a confined space with so many people in it."

But Scott and other soldiers, active and retired, said they remain confident that the tactics being employed by the U.S. military in Baghdad would bring the war to a fairly rapid end, and therefore have the effect of minimizing civilian loss of life.

The urban fight being waged -- combining armored reconnaissance, Special Forces, air power and intelligence -- is a far cry from that seen in earlier wars, in which infantrymen cleared city blocks building by building in bloody combat that produced casualty rates of 30 percent or more. Five U.S. soldiers were reported killed and six missing in fighting on Monday.

"I think this striking a balance between patient siege and urban blitzkrieg -- the reconnaissance in force approach -- has been the right way to go," O'Hanlon said. "If you're going to take down a country, I don't see how else you can do it."