As the president contemplates a "surge" of U.S. troops

into Baghdad, a Vietnam analogy is pertinent. A surge

might merely intensify a policy that is akin to Defense

Secretary Robert McNamara's and Gen. William

Westmoreland's policy in Vietnam. A better policy might

resemble that of two men who subsequently occupied the

offices those men held -- Mel Laird, President Nixon's

first defense secretary, and Gen. Creighton Abrams, who

in 1968 replaced Westmoreland as U.S. commander in

Vietnam.

Richard Nixon won the 1968 election with an implicit

promise to replace the McNamara-Westmoreland policy of

engagement and attrition ("search and destroy"), which

was failing militarily in Vietnam and politically in

America. Nixon's policy, formulated with Laird and

Abrams, was for phased withdrawals of U.S. forces,

coinciding with increased U.S. advisers and other aid for

South Vietnam's army. The announced policy of withdrawals

gave the U.S. some leverage to force the government in

Saigon -- not a paragon, but better than the government

in Baghdad today -- to recognize that the clock was

running on its acceptance of responsibility for Vietnam's

security.

Unfortunately, the political climate in Washington today

is analogous to that of 60 years ago. In 1946-47,

partisan divisions, deepened by disdain for a president

considered in over his head, were threatening to make it

impossible to reverse the unraveling of the U.S. position

in the region that then was most crucial to U.S.

interests -- Europe. In 1946, the president's party

lost control of both houses of Congress, in what was

partly a vote of no confidence in President Harry Truman.

A shattered Europe was sliding toward chaos, with

communism gaining ground in Western as well as Central

Europe.

Truman, however, embraced a proposal for substantial U.S.

aid to Europe, but directed that Secretary of State

George Marshall's name, not his, be on it. That was

achieved when Marshall made the proposal in his June 1947

Harvard commencement address. Truman also instructed

Marshall and his deputy, Dean Acheson, to make necessary

accommodations with Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, the Michigan

Republican who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee.

Today, no one has a promising idea for Iraq comparable to

the Marshall Plan. And who would be the Democrats'

Vandenberg, capable of muting Democrats' ferocious

rejection of all the president's ideas?

Recently, after his 10th trip to Iraq, Bing West, a

former Marine and current correspondent for The Atlantic

Monthly, noted that 70 percent of U.S. casualties are not

from bullets but from roadside bombs. The enemy rarely

engages in sustained firefights with U.S. forces, so U.S.

forces are killing fewer insurgents than the insurgents

recruit. Furthermore, U.S. units spend 15 percent to 30

percent of their time training Iraqis: "If winning is not

a direct goal for U.S. units, we don't need so many

troops in Iraq. If winning is a direct goal, we don't

have enough units in Iraq."

Under a "Laird-Abrams" approach, winning would be the

"direct goal" of Iraqi units. There is, however, this

sobering arithmetic: Based on experience in the Balkans,

an assumption among experts is that to maintain order in

a context of sectarian strife requires one competent

soldier or police officer for every 50 people. For the

Baghdad metropolitan area (population: 6.5 million), that

means 130,000 security personnel. There are 120,000 now,

but 66,000 of them are Iraqi police, many -- perhaps

most -- of whom are worse than incompetent. Because

their allegiances are to sectarian factions, they are not

responsive to legitimate central authority. They are part

of the problem. Therefore even a substantial surge of,

say, 30,000 U.S. forces would leave Baghdad that many

short, and could be a recipe for protracting failure.

Today, Gen. George Casey, U.S. commander in Baghdad, is

in hot water with administration proponents of a "surge"

because he believes what he recently told The New York

Times: "The longer we in the U.S. forces continue to bear

the main burden of Iraq's security, it lengthens the time

that the government of Iraq has to take the hard

decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the

militias. And the other thing is that they can continue

to blame us for all of Iraq's problems, which are at base

their problems."

Baghdad today is what Wayne White -- for 26 years with

the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and

Research, now with the Middle East Institute -- calls

"a Shiite-Sunni Stalingrad." Imagine a third nation's

army operating between -- and against -- both the

German and Russian forces in Stalingrad. That might be

akin to the mission of troops sent in any surge.