"It took three weeks to control militarily the entire country," defence expert Michael Codner told the "War in Iraq: taking stock" conference held Tuesday by Britain's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Codner, director of military sciences at RUSI, said the speed of the operation was all the more surprising since the strategy, aimed at bringing down the Iraqi regime by raining thousands of missiles on Baghdad and simultaneously launching a land offensive, did not work.

"To try to create the right perception through the use of violence is extremely difficult," he said.

Bridget Kendall, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, said the unprecedented media coverage brought its own surprises.

"This was the reporters' war, just as the (1991) Gulf war was the briefers' war," she said, referring to hundreds of journalists "embedded" with US and British troops.

She said the constant live coverage, both on television and on frequently updated media Internet sites, sometimes caused a lack of perspective.

As a result, skirmishes were described as major battles, said Kendall, who also quoted a colleague as saying: "We were reporting what it felt like".

Kendall said the unprecedented number of news teams, far from painting a clearer picture, resulted in dramatic variations from country to country.

"There were four different wars: the American, the British, the European, the Arab," she said. "Was it an achievement to have in the end such dramatic differences?"

Dan Plesch, a RUSI senior research fellow, noted that unlike previous wars where air power was key, the Iraqi campaign was largely won thanks to the M1 Abrams tank, which can reach speeds of over 40 miles per hour (64 kilometers pr hour).

"America is no longer the country that fights wars from 35,000 feetmetres)," Plesch said.

Barney Mayhew, a consultant for Britain's department for international development, noted that the tanks were powerless to prevent looting at Iraqi hospitals and Baghdad's archeological museum.

He criticised the US forces' lack of contingency plans to prevent civilian violence, and said it was "a big mistake" to wait 10 days before moving in to protect the hospitals.

Codner said that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "took the right decisions for the combat phase but law and order was put on one side."

He said a force of gendarmes should have been ready to step in as soon as the fighting was over, but the US-led coalition lacked allies to do that job.

"One of the problems, frankly, was the speed of the collapse," said Edward Chaplin, the foreign office's director for Middle East and North Africa.

The political process of creating a government in Iraq is even more challenging than bringing stability to the country, Chaplin said.

A final surprise could be the future government's nature.

"If that process produces an Islamic government, then that's the choice of the Iraqi people," Chaplin said. "A stable Iraq will require that all the groups in the country to feel that their interests are represented."

RUSI is a center for the study of national and international defence and security.

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