My Worry, Too

It's a question who won in Najaf:

"U.S. military strategy has also suffered a blow, particularly since Najaf is the third confrontation in five months in which Iraqi insurgents fought American troops until they began to take losses, then agreed to a cease-fire so their fighters could rest and regroup. The fear is that Iraqis now believe they can pick the time and place of their attacks and then beat a safe retreat.

'What we will see here is that the Mahdi Army will just rearm, recruit a new group of fighters and move to another city,' said retired Marine Lt. Col. Rick Raftery, an intelligence officer who served in Iraq. 'We'll be playing 'whack-a-mole' somewhere else shortly.'"

The job of an army is to break things and kill people.

And what's "whack-a-mole," anyway?