The past couple of weeks my laptop has been laden with spy-ware that hijacked my AOL Instant Messenger and unleashed a flurry of pop-ups and junk search engines whenever I open up my Web browser.

It's really been a pain in the butt, because when I run my Ad-Aware spy-ware destroyer, the scan always stalls out on this one file in my recycle bin. So I go into my recycle bin to delete that file, and I find out that that file can't be deleted. As a result, my Ad-aware software isn't able to clear out the other dirty "objects" it discovers and I'm still stuck with this pesky spy-ware.

I could go to the computer shop in Willard, but I was told I couldn't drop my computer off for another two weeks and then I'd have to wait two to four more weeks for them to fix it. My tech-savvy friend, after manually clearing out most of the spy-ware he could get to, told me the only other option would be to clean house and reformat the hard drive. Thankfully he fixed most of the problems, but I'm still worried all that digital garbage might come back.

Although my computer's troubles pale in comparison to the enormous difficulties staring down the U.S.-led coalition and the interim Iraqi government today, I did notice an interesting correlation between these two "situations."

This past weekend four battalions of the U.S. Army' 1st Infantry Division and two battalions of the freshly trained Iraqi forces rolled into Samarra, a city located in the rambunctious Sunni triangle northwest of Baghdad, and cleared out a pocket of insurgents whose partners in terror have been as fierce in slowing progress in Iraq as spy-ware has in clogging up my laptop.

Finally, it seems, coalition forces are going back on the offensive to smother an insurgency that has gained momentum ever since the U.S. failed to clean house in Fallujah last April. The primary reason why we're seeing a shift in coalition tactics is because now we have Iraqi troops who are trained and willing to fight alongside the Americans.

In and of itself, this is a huge victory for Iraq and her allies.

In the capture of Samarra, Iraqis witnessed their soldiers' first major tactical victory when the 36th Iraqi Commando Battalion secured the revered Golden Mosque, a shrine sacred to Shi'ites, from insurgents who were holed up inside the mosque with weapons and ammo. We will know in the coming weeks whether this was a true victory if coalition and Iraqi troops can maintain control over the city and establish a legitimate government.

But for the time being, having an Iraqi face with these military operations is crucial to our overall success because it gives these operations a sense of legitimacy to skeptical Iraqis. No doubt an Iraqi military presence will be crucial in the coming weeks as Iraqi government officials and American military brass plan for future offenses into the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi.

So have we discovered the right combination for defending this "spy-ware insurgency"? With the American military serving as my tech-savvy friend who can troubleshoot the problems within Iraq's "Ad-aware" forces and continue to upload better training and more recruits, the enemies of a smoothly operating Iraqi democratic system may have met their match.

But if you talk to the naysayers, especially those of you partisan to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the Samarra victory and the performance of the Iraqi commandos doesn't mean jack.

Iraq, to them, is "lost" and the spy-ware is only getting tougher to get rid of. That's only the case, of course, because of President Bush's incompetence. Don't get me wrong, the administration's record in post-war Iraq hasn't been as rosy as they may have hoped at onset of the war, and some of their policies do warrant criticism.

But come on.

The Democrats are hedging their bets for a Nov. 2 victory on something like Samarra erupting into violence to offer more proof that Iraq is "lost." Sure, I believe their sincerity when they thank the troops for their service and hope that no more lives are lost.

But, as retired Army officer Ralph Peters asked in the New York Post on Tuesday, when did Senator Kerry acknowledge this important victory for allied and Iraqi forces? Did we not have enough Iraqi forces to do the job? What went wrong in this operation that didn't warrant praise from Kerry?

As Kerry's absence from interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's speech to Congress was a little tough to comprehend, so is his silence in the face of the victory in Samarra.