Is it just me, or does it seem like there's always a new reason to spend another few billion in Iraq and stay there another year? Now we've go the United States spending billions and deploying experts to stop IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, which is a pretty fancy term to mean a bomb that they piece together on the fly and put on the side of the road. The situation is just maddening. Not only because we've got American soldiers being blown up by street bombs planted by insurgents, but for the way it's being looked at by the government. I would think that anyone viewing this situation with an objective eye would see this as some ragtag insurgents planting bombs and that's about the end of the situation. The bombs may be fairly advanced due to using Saddam's old materials, but these aren't war experts. But listening to the military you'd think we're dealing with masterminds. Hoaxes are a peril. "The enemy's very smart," said Capt. Peter Weld, Sisk's commander. "They plant a harmless device that soldiers find and gather around, and then they hit them with a real device nearby." I fail to see how "very smart" the enemy is. It's planting a fake bomb. It's not exactly a carefully planned strategy, I'm pretty sure that's shown up in a number of movies. Our military is getting outsmarted by that? You know, I don't even know why they'd need to use a fake bomb. According to the Captain here, the soldiers all gather around the harmless device. The insurgents could just blow that up and not need to worry about having decoys. Is that what our military is trained to do? Find something that looks like a bomb and huddle around it? No wonder people are calling the attackers so smart. People wonder why I say the war isn't planned and constructed well at all, here you go. Then we've got this kind of comment: Lt. Col. Bill Adamson, operations chief for the anti-IED campaign, was realistic about the challenge in a Pentagon interview. "They adapt more quickly than we procure technology," he said of the insurgents. What kind of a state are we in? We're the United States of America, can someone tell me why a bunch of ragtag insurgents are able to stay a step ahead of us? It occurs to me, though. What's going on is we're trying to fight insurgents while protecting the people who live there as peaceful citizens. The military in Iraq is protecting the emerging democracy and those who live in it while detaining and removing the threat of terrorism and insurgency. If this were really a war, we'd blow up the areas like we did at the beginning before we accomplished our mission. Now we're trying to root out the individuals. So what would you call a force that patrols the streets to protect the citizens? An army? I sure wouldn't. I'd call that the police. And that's exactly what our army is doing in Iraq. We haven't done anything remotely for the protection of the United States in as long as we've been there. We forced in a democracy and now we're spending our time and money to make sure it sticks. When did our military become primarily concerned with the well-being of people of another country? But, really, the end result of this is that we've got Sunnis fighting Shiites, with a death toll that's steadily climbing despite officials assuring us the threat is over, and we've got insurgents blowing up Americans. Bush wants to say anyone who opposes us staying there a coward, that we shouldn't want to "cut and run". But really, why are we still there? What benefit are AMERICANs getting? Sure a warm fuzzy feeling from a democratic Iraq is nice, but the cost of this war is just incredible and that's going to hurt us far more than it helps. Some will say "having an ally in the Middle East is what we need". Sure, that'd be nice if we weren't doing it by pissing off other countries and destroying our own military. Our soldiers did not enlist to act as police for Iraqis. They are our protection, and using them for this purpose is simply sickening. Killing them for this purpose is detestable.