Richard M. Kerry.(A)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Iraq: The Democratic nominee says he has a plan -- that he won't detail -- to bring troops home. But what could he do that isn't being tried already?

Voters of a certain age may remember a presidential candidate who ran with what he let people believe was a "secret plan" to end an unpopular war. The year was 1968, the candidate was Richard M. Nixon and the war was Vietnam.

Now John F. Kerry is trying the same "trust-me' trick. He says he will substantially cut U.S. troop strength there in four years, but he refuses to say how.

Even when reminded of his Nixonian echoes (as he was Sunday on ABC's "This Week"), Kerry says no matter: "I don't care what it sounds like. The fact is that I'm not going to negotiate in public today without the presidency, without the power."

So we'll just have to speculate about what he has in mind.

But that may not be too difficult, because he has said enough to squeeze his Iraq choices down to a narrow range. He seems to have ruled out the cut-and-run option, but he also sounds reluctant to dig in deeper and send more troops. Put these self-imposed limits together and you come up with a rather cramped policy box, a lot like the one that the Bush administration sits in now.

What, then, is the big difference between the two? Kerry and ...