WASHINGTON

TWELVE summers ago, Bosnian Serb fighters rounded up 8,000 Muslim men in the village of Srebrenica, herded them into nearby woods and slaughtered them.

The massacre was one of the final acts of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict, a three-year war of siege, expulsion, rape and execution. And it so jolted the United States and allies in Europe that they threatened bombing to compel the warring factions to meet peaceably at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.

They met. There in Ohio, they signed an armistice that created separate lives and separate leadership to assure a semblance of peace among the Catholic Croats, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. The solution — partition — was history’s familiar first choice among last resorts.

Perhaps predictably, it could be said that a kind of Bosnia nostalgia is taking hold in Washington these days over the quandary of Iraq, at least among those who look to its lessons for a way to end the violence.

Nobody wants multiple Srebrenicas in the deserts of Iraq.

And so a growing number of legislators, diplomats and analysts, including at least one Democratic presidential candidate, have taken to citing the Bosnia model as they consider what to do if Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurd cannot muddle their way to a stable shared state.

They ask whether the United States should marshal its military and diplomatic energy to push Iraq’s factions toward a “soft partition” of secure and sustainable regions, home-ruled and homogenous, to prevent full-blown civil war in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East.

Bosnia is an attractive analogy. Armistice reigns. And the American-led stabilization force never lost a soldier to hostile fire.

There’s just one problem — make that three — with comparing Iraq 2007 to Bosnia 1995. The three conditions that made Bosnia susceptible to peace under the Dayton accords simply do not exist for Iraq.

That’s why you don’t hear American generals in Baghdad, many of whom earned patches as officers in the Balkans, talking about an achievable partition. They say no partition would be “soft.” Rather, it would be repressive and murderous. And a huge setback for American foreign policy.

The first crucial condition for the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia was that it was already carved up. When negotiators gathered at Dayton, the raging violence had succeeded in paring, pushing and repulsing Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims into mostly coherent enclaves. War created a sustainable map on the ground. The task facing diplomats was to get it in ink.

Such a map is far from drawn in Iraq. Although two million Iraqis have fled the country and another two million are displaced within Iraq’s borders, up to five million more — 20 percent of the prewar population — would have to be moved to create an ethnically coherent place.

“The geographic boundaries do not run toward partition at all,” said Joost Hiltermann, deputy director of Middle East programs for the International Crisis Group, based in Turkey. “There is no Sunnistan or Shiastan. Nor can you create them given the highly commingled conditions in Iraq, where people remain totally intermixed, especially in the major cities.”

Mr. Hiltermann said that Iraq was “not falling apart into two or three parts; the country risks total collapse, with local actors — power brokers and militia leaders and sheiks — running areas limited in size with totally shifting boundaries, and with Shia often at odds with other Shia and Sunni at odds with other Sunni.”

The second unmet condition is that by 1995 in Bosnia, all three sides had fought themselves to utter exhaustion. In Iraq today, polls show that average citizens are exhausted by the war, but militia-style fighters loyal to the three sectarian factions remain fully tooled for combat — just warming up for advanced bloodletting. Foreign fighters and foreign weapons continue to flow into Iraq over its porous borders.

Which underscores the third condition not visible in Iraq. A genius of the Dayton process was that the outside powers arming and inspiring the Bosnian violence — Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator, and Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian strongman — were at the table along with their Bosnian proxies and Muslim representatives.

With their signatures on the accords, the flames of outside agitation were extinguished.

By contrast, the Bush administration has been unwilling or unable to cajole Iran and Syria into a full diplomatic partnership to end the anti-government and anti-coalition attacks in Iraq. There appear to be few prospects of expanding direct dialogue, especially with Iran.

American officers in Baghdad like to say that their forces have not lost a single tactical engagement in the entire Iraq conflict; but that is something of an irrelevancy, since you cannot kill enough bad guys to win this war. Strategic victory can be gained only through political reconciliation among Iraqis.

Similarly, while Bosnia-like conditions do not exist in Iraq, partition may still be Iraq’s fate — and therefore the United States must prepare to make it as painless and sustainable as possible.

Leading advocates for partition include Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination; Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia.

The Biden-Gelb plan, proposed in spring of 2006, was the first to call for “decentralizing Iraq.”

“You make federalism work for the Iraqis,” Mr. Biden said. “You give them control over the fabric of their daily lives. You separate the parties. You give them breathing room. Let them control their local police, their education, their religion and marriage — the very things they’re fighting over.”

But Reidar Visser, a specialist on Iraq’s sectarian issues at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said that “apart from the Kurds in the north, there is no unanimous, popular demand for federalism or soft partition or any partition at all.”

Mr. Visser, who edits a Web site for posting historical research on Iraq, www.historiae.org, said that despite arguments by those in favor of partition, “Iraq has no tradition of being compartmentalized into neat, sectarian entities,” except for a relatively brief period between 1880 and World War I.

“For long periods before the 1880s, the Ottoman Empire governed these lands as one,” he said. “It is untrue that the three Ottoman provinces that became Iraq in 1921 were characterized by clear sectarian identities.”

Modern history offers few examples of politicians’ ability to plan for partition, especially as a prescription to forestall pending violence or to guarantee the resolution of long-term tensions, particularly on the Asian continent.

Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the British partition of Pakistan and India, which created 15 million refugees, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in riots and left the subcontinent devastated for years.

The British left Palestine a year later, leaving behind the State of Israel, which has fought a series of major wars and minor skirmishes with Arab neighbors.

A recent amicable separation should be noted: The Czech Republic split from Slovakia after the collapse of Communism, a time when both societies were developed and conflict was neither desired nor anticipated.

But advocates of decentralization and separation in Iraq, including Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argue that “the time may be approaching when the only hope for a more stable Iraq is a soft partition of the country.”

Mr. O’Hanlon, co-author of a new policy review, “The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq,” acknowledges that “creating such a structure could prove difficult and risky. However, when measured against the alternatives — continuing to police an ethno-sectarian war, or withdrawing and allowing the conflict to escalate — the risks of soft partition appear more acceptable.”

“If you don’t do it through negotiation, you will see it on the battlefield,” he added. “It is kinder to negotiate this kind of internal resettlement.”

But senior military planners caution that should partition become American policy, withdrawal almost certainly wouldn’t. Partition would require a stabilization force — code for American military presence — of 75,000 to 100,000 troops for years to come. And Bosnia’s record of no soldier lost is hardly likely to be repeated in a post-partition Iraq.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company