The president's impromptu news conference Tuesday was a gutsy and go-for-broke attempt to signal to the American people -- and the Iraqi people, too -- that he was in hands-on mode, determined to stay the course, steadfast and confident in backing up the embattled Shiite-Kurdish coalition government in Baghdad.

But Bush was betting on a long shot, not the sure thing he was promised for so long and still clearly believes in.

It is certainly true that the rapidly organized new Iraqi army is launching the largest counter-insurgency operation in its young and troubled history in a bid to break the back of the insurgency that has been wreaking havoc across the city of Baghdad. It is also true that 40,000 Iraqi troops backed by significant U.S. forces have divided the city into 23 zones and that they are in earnest in their search-and-destroy operations there.

But the wave of counter-bombings and other insurgent guerrilla attacks that has erupted in response to this operation does not have any of the characteristics of a desperate, last-ditch attempt to derail a successful political strategy, as the president insisted in Tuesday.

"What we are seeing is a group of frustrated and desperate people who kill innocent life," Bush said in the Rose Garden. "... I believe the Iraqi government is plenty capable of dealing with them."

But the Iraqi government is not, at least not yet, dealing with the insurgents. Two Iraqi troops were killed Tuesday by another car bomb near Baquba. And in Baghdad, gunmen killed three elite Iraqi Army commandos and wounded at least seven more in an ambush in the city's Ghazaliya district.

Some 27 Iraqi police officers were killed Monday in a multiple, convergent attack by suicide bombers in the Shiite town of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad. And the trend of attacks across Iraq in terms of numbers, casualties inflicted and tactical capabilities shown by the insurgents has been worryingly on the increase. In eastern Mosul a prominent local television news broadcaster, Girgis Mahmud Mohammed, was shot dead Tuesday.

In the past month there have been 140 car-bomb attacks across Iraq, an enormous increase over the same period a year ago. They have killed 750 Iraqis and 70 U.S. troops. On Monday four U.S. troops were killed when an Iraqi air force plane crashed 90 miles northeast of Baghdad and another four Italian troops perished in an overnight helicopter crash at Baquba.

There was more bad news, embarrassing as well as depressing, for U.S. forces. Raja Nawaf, the kidnapped Iraqi governor of Anbar province, was found dead in a house in Rawa Monday near Iraq's border with Syria after U.S. troops captured the house he was in after a firefight.

Also on Monday U.S. troops seized, apparently by accident, Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, the leader of the largest Sunni Muslim political party in Iraq and previously the temporary president of the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi Governing Council. He was held for only 12 hours, but the incident looked certain to further torpedo what waning hopes U.S. officials still have of weaning Iraq's Sunni community away from support for the insurgents.

That made it all the more imperative that the major new counterinsurgency offensive, Operation Lightning, should succeed. It was launched in Baghdad Sunday involving 40,000 troops.

The scale of the operation invited comparisons with the Battle of Algiers during the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence when French army forces succeeded in breaking the back of the FLN insurgency in the Algerian capital more than 40 years ago, although they eventually had to concede defeat in the war.

But the obvious parallel to U.S. minds is much more likely to be the 1968 Viet Cong Tet offensive against U.S. forces in the main cities of South Vietnam. There too, the can-do, cocky confidence of a Texan president in a war half a world away was challenged head-on by a shocking series of insurgent attacks that called into question the entire strategy of the war.

There are, of course, striking differences between Johnson in Vietnam and Bush in Iraq, although not all of them are in the current president's favor. Around 20,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Vietnam by the time of Tet. The total U.S. death toll in Iraq is still only 1,600, though the rate of U.S. soldiers seriously injured in Iraq is already comparable according to some measures with the rate of such casualties in Vietnam by 1966.

Also, Johnson was coming up to presidential elections at a time when race riots and the unpopular military draft were tearing the country apart. The current war is inflicting massive strains on the superb U.S. professional army and its National Guard and Army Reserve support systems. But the administration has not yet even dared to hint at reinstating the draft, though there have been many cross-party discussions about such an eventuality on Capitol Hill, and the issue may well take center stage after the mid-term congressional elections in November 2006.

Still, politically, the current upsurge in violence across Iraq, and especially in Baghdad, looks very unlikely to politically destroy or cripple the president the way Tet did to LBJ. That is especially the case as the electronic media in the United States are far more passive and respectful to the current administration than the '60s media were to Johnson.

However, in purely military terms, the current upsurge of violence in Baghdad may be far more formidable than Tet turned out to be.

For Tet, despite proving in the long run to be a decisive strategic and political victory for the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese operators, was at the time a catastrophic tactical defeat. The veteran cadres of the Viet Cong in all the major cities of South Vietnam were decimated by it. Eventually, the North Vietnamese army had to enter the war in the South directly because U.S. forces had inflicted such devastating casualties on the VC guerrillas.

That may yet happen to the insurgents in Iraq, but there is no significant indication that it has done so yet. U.S. and allied forces in Iraq still have to gain the kind of intelligence penetration of the Viet Cong that the CIA's Phoenix program eventually provided in Vietnam.

What is most worrying about the current upsurge of violence in Iraq is precisely that it does not have the last-gasp, do-or-die characteristics of the Viet Cong forces who threw everything available they had into Tet in a bid to discredit Johnson and swing the course of the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

The insurgents in Iraq continue to show disturbing signs of growing in organizational capability, numbers and grass-roots support within the Sunni Muslim community.

The long-term prospects for the United States are far from hopeless in Iraq. The insurgency can still only count on active support from the Sunni minority community, and the United States has so far avoided disastrously alienating crucial elements of the majority Shiite community, although given the reviving popularity of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the growing ties between Shiite political leaders and neighboring Iran, that potential danger cannot at all be discounted.

Elections have been held, a new coalition government has been formed, and numerically impressive new security forces are being massed. But catastrophic U.S. political and strategic mistakes in the early months of the occupation are still exacting their costs today. And as the current wave of violence indicates, the insurgents remain on the upswing, able to inflict mayhem on an increasing scale, apparently at will.

It will take more than the resolve the president amply displayed at his Rose Garden news conference to reverse this state of affairs. It may require radically different military and even political strategies and significantly larger deployments of U.S. troops than the administration has so far been willing to provide. These were issues the president did not address.