Dealing with roadside bombs.What's wrong with this picture?

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I was watching a broadcast by CNN of a group of soldiers tasked with searching for and removing roadside bombs in Iraq. The scene was a car adjacent to a paved road with its hood up. Behind the car was a US Army vehicle that looked like a tank and maybe was a Bradley fighter. It was starting to push the vehicle to get it even farther off the road. They weren't sure whether there were explosives in the car. Then one of the soldiers noticed someone in their peripheral vision, an Iraqi or insurgent, and suspected that maybe he had a cell phone to detonate any explosives that may be in the car. The the car exploded and the soldiers in the tank like vehicle, which now was on fire, started to get out of the tank while removing ammunition before it exploded.

There was more to report but I want to focus on what appeared to me to be a very stupid military plan. Why in God's name didn't they just shoot a shell at the car and blow it up. And why isn't there a policy that states any car on the side of specified roads will be blown up rather than trying to push them to the side of the road. Once blown up they could push it off the road easily. This would save lives of our soldiers. It's a no brainer and yet our military has some delusion that there process to deal with these is working. Come on. It's like everything else this civilian leadership planned for this war. None of it works!