The “Secret Plan” Ploy

PARIS Even though Richard Nixon didn't have one, the notion that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam war helped him win the presidency in 1968.

Actually, "secret plan" wasn't Nixon's term; a reporter on deadline used it as he covered Nixon's speech promising quick victory in that vastly unpopular war. But recognizing the power of those deceiving words, and politics being politics, Nixon never corrected the journalistic shortcut.

The rest, as they say, is history.

What goes around comes around, it is also said, and that's especially true about political tricks that work. Now we're hearing not of a secret plan, but of a yet-to- be announced "alternative strategy" for a war that shows no signs of turning and an occupation that is tragically failing to pacify the terrain.

The Iraq Study Group, a commission headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d that has President George W. Bush's endorsement, promises soon to produce recommendations for Iraq. A little respect is in order for any escape hatch that Baker may offer the Bush administration.

Besides political trickery, the parallel circumstances between Nixon's "secret plan" and Baker's "alternative strategy" are striking. An election figures in both, of course. Nixon's plan was credited with helping him win in 1968, and Republicans (if not Bush and Dick Cheney themselves) are eager for anything now that might move them beyond the embarrassing stalemate in Iraq as they try to hold onto Congress in elections less than three weeks away.

The image of "quagmire" has been visited enough already, and is questionable besides. America's involvement in Vietnam lasted more than a decade and cost the lives 55,000 of its troops, many of them draftees. Iraq is of Bush's doing and it is a volunteer army that is fighting the war, though the mandatory extensions of duty in Iraq have turned the fighting force into something less than a volunteer one.

But Bush himself has acknowledged some echoes. Asked by a television interviewer whether he agreed with the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current surge of violence in Iraq might be equivalent to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, the president allowed that this could be so. "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election," he said.

Among other parallels, it's interesting to reflect on the spurious foundations for both wars. In the Vietnam era, Congress authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to wage war because of a fabricated incident in the Tonkin Gulf. A modern day Congress nodded along irresponsibly as fabricated intelligence about Iraq's weapons capability passed before it.

There's another parallel that's obvious. Vietnam damaged America's standing in the world and its competence to fulfill its obligation as the "indispensable nation." The consequences of Bush's misadventure in Iraq are already blindingly apparent not just in America's diminished stature abroad but also in the Bush administration's inability both to challenge Iran and North Korea and to persuade allies to do so.

Finally, and it's only a footnote, there's the craftiness of Baker. He may be no Nixon, but he's one of the most politically adept operatives of his generation. He may also be the only official from the first Bush administration who has credibility both with the electorate and with the current president himself.

At this point, if the Iraq Study Group has a plan for Iraq it is indeed secret. There are some leaked reports from members other than Baker, and there are Baker's own strategically placed words that whatever his group recommends, it will not be "staying the course."

Nixon was wily enough to use the reporter's "secret plan" to help him win votes. The question now is whether Bush is smart enough to accept whatever cover Baker may offer. The signs are not all negative. While he rattles on about "staying the course," Bush also said at a news conference last week, "Don't do what you're doing if it's not working - change."

From Baghdad, the chief U.S. military spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, messages that the old strategy isn't working. So let's hope Bush will be wise enough to grab at the new one that Baker will offer. Secret or not, somebody needs a plan, and fast.