We hardly needed the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end to remind us of that war. Iraq provides daily reminders, prompting frequent comparisons to Vietnam. While many of the analogies are misplaced, looking back at America's intervention in Vietnam can be valuable.

The major challenge now facing the United States in Iraq is to establish a stable and powerful indigenous military to provide a secure environment for nation-building.

The U.S. Army's initial unwillingness to integrate South Vietnamese soldiers into its military plans--and its later inability to motivate the indigenous troops to take over the fighting--tells us what to avoid in Iraq.

The old Iraqi army fell apart in April 2003 as American soldiers marched on Baghdad. As the insurgency grew and American casualties mounted, the coalition forces started putting Iraq's army together again. Many of the same soldiers came back to sign up--it was only at the higher levels that Baathist officers were purged. Both Iraq and the United States have an interest in strengthening a purely Iraqi force.

Still some lessons

President Bush calls the comparison of Iraq with Vietnam a "false analogy" and accuses those who use it of sending the wrong message to the enemy and to the troops. Likewise, Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., calls the analogy "wrong, disturbing and dangerous."

In fact, Vietnam does not make for a good comparison with Iraq--but the differences are informative. The most striking difference between the two situations is in the sequence of war and nation-building. In Vietnam, the United States attempted nation-building under South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's administration for nearly a decade before intervening directly with ground troops; in Iraq, a short and overwhelming display of force preceded nation-building. Moreover, the Americans were facing a much stronger adversary--including an organized army--in Vietnam.

Beginning in 1969, the Nixon administration implemented its policy of "Vietnamization," withdrawing U.S. troops while simultaneously turning over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam the fighting and the pacification efforts. By 1973, the South Vietnamese army was the strongest in Southeast Asia, boasting more than 1 million soldiers and toting the most advanced weaponry, thanks to U.S. Army programs such as Enhance and Enhance Plus. However, unimpressive performances during a joint incursion into Cambodia and the 1972 spring offensive testified otherwise. Finally, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell to the communists. Where did Vietnamization go wrong?

From the entry of American ground forces in 1965, South Vietnamese forces were made to feel marginalized in defending South Vietnam. This was mainly due to the U.S. Army's belief in 1965-69 that the South Vietnamese troops were essentially irrelevant to victory or defeat. Not only were the soldiers equipped with inferior weapons, underpaid and given poor housing compared to their American counterparts, but they also were relegated to so-called pacification missions.

U.S. soldiers had more respect for their enemies from the North than for their allies in the South. Training and communication were beset with linguistic, social and cultural barriers. By the time South Vietnamese soldiers started replacing U.S. soldiers in 1969, it was too late to induce them to adopt what had come to be regarded as U.S. strategic goals, rather than South Vietnamese ones.

It's not too late

Now, in Iraq, a window of opportunity is still open for Americans. According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States wasted the whole first year after the invasion in halfhearted attempts to create effective Iraqi military and police forces. The bulk of the army is made up of soldiers who were fighting Americans a few months ago. Ethnic and religious divisions among the men, and their legacy of service under an autocrat, make it difficult for them to attain modern professional military standards. However, the Iraqi people are much less distrustful of the Iraqi army than they are of occupying U.S. forces.

The Multinational Security Transition Command, set up late last year, must focus on the Iraqi army's esprit de corps. It is not too late to incorporate and integrate Iraqi forces in strategic planning and operations so that they have a stake in securing a stable Iraq. Otherwise, the Iraqi army will soon be overwhelmed by the size and hostility of a growing insurgency.

The Vietnam analogy has too often been deployed in times of political conflict in the United States. But the comparison can be useful. If we learn the right lessons from the mistakes in Vietnam, we need not be condemned to repeat them in Iraq.

Not long ago, an experimental malaria vaccine made newspaper headlines. Over six months, it more than halved serious episodes of malaria in 2,000 children in rural Mozambique. The only trouble is that it will take at least 10 years to come to market.

Fortunately, there are new, effective drugs already available that could start to loosen malaria's stranglehold on many impoverished countries. With a modest global investment, these drugs could be mobilised today.

Malaria is one of the world's greatest threats to life and human performance. Each year, it kills more than 1m people, mainly children in sub-Saharan Africa, and triggers some 500m debilitating attacks in people of all ages throughout the tropics. The toll in lost productivity is a big contributor to Africa's poor economic performance.

All concerned with malaria know that new drugs are needed. After the second world war, a drug called chloroquine became standard. Until about 20 years ago, it worked well in Africa. In addition, it was cheap, averaging 10 cents per treatment. However, chloroquine-resistant strains, which first emerged in south-east Asia, are now rife throughout Africa. The death toll from malaria is rising once again.

What makes this situation more distressing is the existence of an effective alternative. When the first signs of drug-resistant malaria appeared in Asia during the Vietnam war, Chinese scientists developed a family of drugs from sweet wormwood, a common shrub that had been used for centuries in traditional medicine. These "artemisinin compounds" are now standard components of malaria treatment in Asia, where they have proved to be the best ever anti-malarial drugs. To circumvent future drug resistance, however, the time has come to partner artemisinins with other anti-malarial drugs, creating artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) - the same strategy that underlies the treatment of HIV and tuberculosis. In 2002, the World Health Organisation went on record urging governments to adopt such therapies rapidly in order to provide more effective malaria treatment and slow the spread of drug resistance.

Now the only remaining obstacles to these treatments in Africa are economic. At present, ACTs cost about $2 a treatment, not 10 cents. Subsidies are needed - probably in the region of $500m a year, a small amount on any global scale. The other challenge is how this money enters the drug supply chain.

To overcome the need for a new system of delivery, a recent report from the Institute of Medicine, the US-based health advisory organisation, recommended that ACTs be bought at competitive prices by an international organisation such as Unicef, then resold at a deep discount to governments and private wholesalers in countries where malaria is endemic. The main condition underlying access to subsidised ACTs would be that they flow freely through public and private channels - just as chloroquine does now. This approach would accomplish two objectives: it would allow the existing private market to support the switch to ACTs and it would keep the treatment's cost to consumers down to about the price of chloroquine.

Centralised purchasing has other advantages. It would assure a market for producers, and in particular would encourage the planting of sweet wormwood to overcome the existing reported shortage of artemisinin. It would also facilitate quality control. Moreover, the scale of any international subsidy of combination therapy would discourage the distribution of any solo drug whose use might encourage new resistance down the line.

Above all, in the case of anti-malarial drugs, centralised purchasing would provide the impetus for a swift change in the way the world treats malaria. Without a co-ordinated programme, the change is far more likely to be gradual and incomplete, the scenario most likely to jeopardise the effectiveness of artemisinins over the next few years.

There can be no excuse for delay. Resistance is overwhelming the usefulness of existing drugs, and deaths due to drug-resistant malaria are accelerating daily, especially among the poor of Africa. The IOM has proposed a feasible plan to introduce ACTs quickly. All that remains is for the international donor and finance communities to embrace the logic, allocate funds and take action once and for all against malaria.

The Presidential election campaign is in the home stretch. Neither the President nor Senator Kerry has secured a decisive advantage.

Iraq is now the central issue of debate, as one would expect, since the war is going badly, and the economy is reasonably robust. The debate is finally beginning to focus on substantive differences between the candidates after a summer in which they mainly exchanged personal attacks on their respective Vietnam records. Their strategies are now clear: Bush will challenge Kerry's steadiness and consistency; Kerry will challenge the necessity of the campaign in Iraq and the competence of the administration's efforts there. But while their diagnoses of the situation differ, their proposals for dealing with what is clearly a mess are not so clearly differentiated. Both propose to seek additional help from members of the international community; both emphasize the need to train and arm Iraqi security forces; and both are hopeful that elections will enhance the legitimacy of Iraqi leaders, fortify their efforts to dry up the insurgency, and allow American forces to be reduced and eventually withdrawn.

Historically, wars have been unkind to presidents on whose watch they occurred. The Korean War reduced Harry Truman's popularity so dramatically by 1952 that he gave up his quest for a second full term. The Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson from office, despite impressive domestic achievements. Victory in the Gulf War of 1991 sent George H.W. Bush's approval ratings soaring, but within a year he was defeated by an obscure Arkansas governor.

Yet President Bush still clings to a narrow lead in the polls. Why?

Senator Kerry has argued that the Iraqi campaign is a "war of choice." Perhaps so. But Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the United States nearly a decade ago. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, war with Islamic extremists will continue. And American voters remain nearly evenly divided as to whether John Kerry has the steadfast character and consistent judgment they want in a wartime leader.

Uneasiness about the financial and human costs of the war is growing. Casualty figures in Iraq are high compared to the numbers killed or wounded in post-cold war American interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Yet, those earlier conflicts involved humanitarian interventions in which Americans perceived little strategic stake. However, military personnel killed in Iraq - now more than 1000 - still number less than a third of the civilians who perished in New York and Washington on 9/11. And ours is a volunteer military that is highly motivated.

When confronted by an attack, Americans have consistently taken the fight to the enemy, engaging them in combat as far from our shores as possible. The president has portrayed the campaign in Iraq as an integral feature of the war on terrorism. To at least a number of voters, the absence of any terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 provides evidence that his approach, while not without significant costs, is working.

Victory at the polls may be a dubious prize. Whoever is sworn in on January 20, 2005 will face daunting choices. American options in Iraq range from the "potentially disastrous" to the "extremely distasteful." We cannot simply walk away. And a host of other dilemmas - e.g. nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea, a Middle East peace process that has gotten off track, strains in the trans-Atlantic relations, a multilateral trade round that has lost momentum - demand urgent attention. Beyond this, the next president will be hampered by a gigantic fiscal deficit and a military that is stretched thin. In short, he will have few easy choices. It makes one wonder why politicians yearn for this job.