BAGHDAD - "American soldiers rolled into Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum on Saturday in search of Iranian-linked militants and as many as 26 Iraqis were killed in what a U.S. officer described as "an intense firefight."

"But residents, police and hospital officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused U.S. forces of firing blindly on the innocent. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for the assault into a district where he has barred U.S. operations in the past."

Again, how to lose a war. If you aren't going to leave a civil-legal infrastructure and control the ground, you can't win. You can't kill 'em all when they are fighting for their ideology, land and way of life. (Well, Native Americans would disagree.)

Arf