Washington ? Iraqi military planes were still safely parked Tuesday near mosques and cemeteries in Baghdad, their commanders confident of surviving U.S. bombing runs.

In Basra, Iraqi fighters offered stiff resistance from residential areas, leaving some British troops to fume that what was needed was a tough bombing run to clean them out.

Even state-run Iraqi television, which has broadcast disturbing videotape of U.S. prisoners of war and perhaps dead American soldiers, had remained unscathed until Tuesday, enabling Saddam Hussein to take to the airwaves to urge Iraqis to battle.

U.S. and allied military could have blown away all these targets days ago. But with an eye to the huge postwar challenge of running Iraq, the United States and Britain have decided for political and humanitarian reasons to fight a war that minimizes Iraqi civilian casualties and attempts to keep Iraq’s infrastructure intact — even at greater risk to coalition forces.

The setbacks of the last few days have highlighted the tradeoffs of the approach. And already Pentagon officials are signaling changes. Targets that had been off limits may not stay that way.

In the case of Baghdad television, for example, a Pentagon official said Tuesday afternoon: “Keep your channel tuned.”

A series of explosions was heard early today in Baghdad, and the U.S. military said coalition aircraft struck Iraqi state-run television. Iraqi Satellite TV’s signal went off the air, cutting the service that broadcasts 24 hours a day outside Iraq. Iraq’s domestic television service was not broadcasting when the satellite TV signal went off the air at 4:30 a.m. Baghdad time.

In part because their goal is not to devastate the country, Western troops entered Iraq in large numbers only one day after bombs and missiles began striking their targets — unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when ground troops mounted an attack after 39 days of air attacks decimated Iraq’s forces.

It is a strategy fraught with risk for the U.S.-led troops now approaching perhaps the most dangerous phase of the war: a confrontation with elite Republican Guard units protecting Baghdad. U.S. forces have now lost at least 20 troops killed and 14 captured or missing, plus scores of wounded, and the campaign, while rapid by the standard of most wars, has experienced flareups of fighting in areas commanders thought they had subdued and contained.

In any war, commanders must balance military and political objectives.

“You could have a tremendous military success — kill every Republican Guard member — but if in the process you have ruined the chance of rebuilding Iraq, it would be a political failure,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University national security expert. “You have to come up with a military plan that shares that political goal, or else it’s a failure.”

Stoic acceptance of a certain degree of risks and setbacks has not been a hallmark of the U.S. military in recent years. In Kosovo, the NATO coalition used air power but declined to send in Western military ground forces to stop the ethnic cleansing that war was supposed to prevent.

But Feaver said the administration clearly has placed a higher priority on accomplishing political goals and the military mission in Iraq than on protecting coalition forces. But that will work only as long as the Bush team does not panic in the face of higher casualties, he added.

“The Achilles heel in this approach is the staying power of the administration,” Feaver said. “If the administration panics, this was a really dumb approach.”