In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968. Biometric tracking and databases have since made extraordinary advances, yet our vaunted technical experts have failed at this elementary task in Iraq.

Any time a car is stopped in the United States, the police run an immediate check. The New York Police Department tracks criminal trends by neighborhood and block in a real time database called Compstat. The Chicago police have handheld devices that send fingerprints over the airwaves and get a response in minutes. So do America's border police. But in Iraq, for four years American military units have been forced to concoct their own identification databases using laptops, spreadsheets and poster boards. At any one time, the military is conducting dozens of separate census operations. Houses are labeled by one unit and re-labeled by the next.

Meanwhile, it is common for an Iraqi civilian to carry two or three IDs with different names. The result: Last year 400,000 coalition and Iraqi troops made fewer than 40,000 arrests; in contrast, 22,000 New York City patrolmen made more than 500,000 spot checks and 313,000 arrests.