If the dean of Columbia University needs evidence to support his theory that journalism schools ought to give their students a broader education, he need look no farther than the reporting being generated by the war in Iraq.

There are exceptions, and perhaps there will be more and more of them as time goes on, but the general rule during the first week of war was that we were being informed by people unable to place what they saw and heard into context. They so focused on tactical slices of the war that they were oblivious to its strategic aims, and whether they were being met.

"Oooh, that was a big noise," was the comment one television expert made on one of the first days of bombing in Baghdad. That might have been television's commentary at its lowest possible ebb, but so far, there has not been a great deal of distance between that and the high points.

Even the retired senior officers who are used by the media to give context to reports from the field seem to have struggled to make the military picture take shape in people's minds. No wonder, since they have been competing with a flood of negativity from people whose judgment seems to have been overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of war. One good example was the BBC report that suggested, when two British soldiers were killed, that this was "the worst possible news for the armed forces".

The BBC's coverage, in particular, has been so negative, so reluctant to acknowledge any kind of coalition progress and so quick to seize upon and shine a spotlight on bad news that one American political commentator, Andrew Sullivan, has taken to referring to it as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.

Despite the hand-wringing, the truth of the matter is that the war could hardly have gone better. British and American troops have been slicing through the opposition all over Iraq, themselves suffering very light casualties, indeed.

The coalition obviously made an early decision to advance on Baghdad as swiftly as possible, even though that meant leaving pockets of resistance in their rear, to be sorted out when there was leisure to do so. Although that is a tactic that has been used often and in many places in the past, some reporters have used that resistance at every opportunity as evidence of the failure of the coalition's war strategy.

But failure it is most assuredly not.

Coalition forces dominate the air over Iraq. Not a single Iraqi airman has so much as tried to take off.

Coalition special forces, which specialise in reconnaissance, have been in the country for months, plotting target coordinates and feeding other intelligence back from all over Iraq, including Baghdad.

British forces have secured the oilfields in the south and Iraq's only access to the sea at Umm Qasr on the al Faw Peninsula. The difficulties they have encountered at Basra are undoubtedly a nuisance to them, but hardly likely to disrupt the achievement of the aims of the war.

The so-called Scud Box, those areas in the western desert from which it is most likely that missiles might be fired into other countries, like Israel, has been secured.

Tank and mechanised units of the US 3rd Infantry Division and infantry units of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force are all but at the gates of Baghdad in the south, supported by attack helicopters.

The US 101st Airborne Division has arrived just west of Karbala, after a very quiet advance from Kuwait along the Iraqi-Saudi frontier. Those troops, with their fleet of 300 helicopter gunships, are securing a front line west of Baghdad and will support any push into the city.

The 173rd Airborne Brigade, parachuting into Northern Iraq, has opened a northern front by taking an airbase in Kurdish-held territory. Troops from the 1st Infantry Division will be ferried into that area fairly quickly.

When those northern and western deployments are complete, virtually every Iraqi military unit still capable of fighting will be enclosed in a circle of US troops.

Facing coalition forces at Baghdad are two Republican Guard armoured divisions. Their tanks date from the 1960s and are mostly dug in, because it would be foolish to try to manoeuvre against superior American Abrams tanks, even if they did have air cover, which they don't.

Whenever people talk about the Republican Guard, they talk of them as "elite" troops. They certainly are the best of Iraq's military. They are given the best equipment, the best training, the best pay and the best housing. But in truth, that isn't much. They are still poorly equipped and poorly trained by comparison with coalition forces. During the 1991 Gulf War, they managed to lose 61 tanks and 34 armoured personnel carriers in the space of an hour at the hands of the US 1st Armoured Division in a battle near Basra.

It was Republican Guard troops - specifically the unit called Medina al Munawara - who tried to take on the US Army 3rd Division south of Baghdad last week, and lost hundreds of troops in the attempt, while the Americans lost two tanks, but not a single soldier.

Thousands of Iraqi regular soldiers have surrendered. Irregular fighters and Baath party goons have apparently reached the stage of having to force Iraqi soldiers into battle at gunpoint and to use human shields to try to get close to coalition troops.

This is no time for the West to be bursting into tears and retreating, as you might be persuaded by some "war correspondents" to think. Instead, it is time for the Iraqis to be thinking very carefully about how to get themselves out of the really awful mess they're in.

Assuming they will be unable to coax Syria, or some other Arab nation, into the conflict, they have a very limited number of options for continuing the fight for long. They might make use of some kind of weapon of mass destruction. One suspects that if they were reluctant to do that at the beginning of the campaign, possibly for fear of losing international support, they will be doubly reluctant to do it now.

Their only hope is to be able to make the war's progress so painful for the coalition from a public relations standpoint, that the US and Britain will give up.

Many commentators have expressed surprise that the population of Iraq, despite having suffered greatly at Saddam Hussein's hands, has not risen up to help the coalition oust him. They have short memories - the United States betrayed those who did that after the first Gulf War. When they left, Iraq's rulers killed as many as 250,000 people in the process of ruthlessly suppressing any kind of opposition. That Iraqis would be slow to commit themselves as a result of that experience is completely understandable.

Saddam Hussein has plainly put all of his eggs into his Baghdad basket. There, he is surrounded by civilians, whose presence severely limits the coalition's use of air and artillery. He obviously wants to draw US forces into Baghdad and fight them, street by street, prolonging the agony for as long as possible. Whether his own people have the stomach to carry on that kind of fighting for long remains to be seen. If he is unable to muster sufficient international pressure to stop coalition forces prosecuting the war, his plan seems pointless, unless you factor in Mr Hussein's view that resistance against the United States is a victory in and of itself.

In urban warfare, defending troops possess a great advantage - they are familiar with the terrain and have had ample time to plant mines, position snipers and set up ambushes.

In this case, the coalition forces will have the same problems that Israeli troops faced in attacking Jenin recently - especially the pressure to contain collateral damage to civilians and civilian property. Coalition officials will have to try to evacuate areas where there is likely to be fighting.

Good intelligence is the key to successful urban fighting, and coalition forces will undoubtedly be assisted enormously by the work their special forces units will have been able to do inside Baghdad so far. These troops will have been able to spot snipers and booby traps, map out the routes Iraqi forces take to get to and from areas of the city, identify where they might be quartered, and so on. During any such battle, special forces will themselves be able to operate as snipers, among other things.

In Jenin, the Israelis took great care to move in unpredictable ways. They used tanks and bulldozers to level buildings that were a threat to them, or to open new entrances in buildings whose doors they had reason to suspect might to booby-trapped. They moved through Jenin in apparently illogical ways.

One Palestinian fighter is said to have told a member of Amnesty International that "the Israelis were everywhere, behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?"

Let's hope we hear that again, after the fight in Baghdad.

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