The Marine Times reports that starting next month, our troops will need to visit a judge for a warrant when wishing to search a home or arrest an individual. Gone is the blanket protection they needed to catch terrorists–now they need to consult Iraqi officials that are often as corrupt as the terrorists we’re trying to catch.

For nearly six years, American troops have been free under a U.N. mandate to search any home and detain anyone deemed a security risk.

All that changes next month, when the mandate expires and a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement takes effect. From then on, troops must obtain Iraqi warrants for searches and arrests — and U.S. officers say the requirement is one of the biggest headaches in complying with the new rules.

This turns combat operations into a paper-based bureaucracy game.

The U.S. military is about to face the same rules. The security pact states that as of Jan. 1, American troops may not search homes or make arrests without warrants “except in the case of active combat operations.” [...] For the U.S. soldiers, that means spending a lot of time at the copy machine as they try to organize the warrants already held by the Iraqis, said Smith, 29, of Norman, Okla.

He acknowledged that the system will take some getting used to.

“Their system is very paper-based, whereas we like to have it all in an Excel spreadsheet,” he said, standing in his base office underneath a strategic map and a red Christmas stocking hung on the wall.

All this time I thought we were fighting a war. Apparently we’re just playing real-life Dungeons and Dragons. This disgusts me.