Why hasn’t the administration pushed for the resources for Iraq’s reconstruction?

I keep waiting for the president to reveal our strategy for fighting terrorism in Baghdad.

Instead all I hear is patriotic pep talk.

“The more progress we make in Iraq the more desperate the terrorists will become,” President Bush told the American Legion on Tuesday. But if such progress is so important, why won’t Bush field the resources to make it come true?

Even neoconservatives have begun to criticize the White House for not putting enough money where its mouth is. Among them is William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a prime mover behind the Iraq war. He wrote this week that he found “baffling” the Bush administration’s failure to commit resources for Iraq rebuilding commensurate with the high stakes there.

I had grave doubts about the administration’s handling of this war and its willful misreading of what would follow. But once the United States dumped Saddam, it took on legal and moral responsibility to run Iraq until elections can be held for a new national government.

To fail in our stewardship (or withdraw now) would be a worse betrayal of Iraqis than Bush I’s failure to support the 1991 Iraqi uprising. It would condemn Iraq to chaos and practically guarantee the triumph of Islamists and terrorists, who have poured into the postwar vacuum. The United States would have created the failed Middle Eastern state of our worst nightmares.

This must not be allowed to happen.

So it is “baffling,” to use Kristol’s term, that the White House withholds the resources necessary to prevent such a disaster. He rightly cites a shortage of U.S. troops and U.S. funds for reconstruction, along with an “astonishing lack” of American civilians to run the occupation authority. All contribute to the instability that turns many Iraqis against us and enables terrorists to operate.

“We understand the administration’s fear of asking Congress for the necessary funds,” Kristol says, noting the price tag may be “close to $60 billion” (U.S. occupation czar Paul Bremer suggests $100 billion.) “But … the time to bite the bullet is now, not six months from now when Iraq turns to crisis and the American campaign season is fully under way.”

So what explains the Bush delay? Could it be that the president’s political guru, Karl Rove, is warning that such sums are political poison – and will reopen the sore issues of deficits and tax cuts?

Or could it be that the president still expects to off-load the bulk of Iraq costs onto alienated allies? Bush has put out a call for other nations to send tens of thousands of troops and provide tens of billions in aid for Iraq at an international donors’ conference in October. The chances of this happening are on a par with Osama bin Laden’s handing himself over voluntarily to U.S. forces.

Unless, that is, the United States is willing to make the Iraq military mission more multilateral – say under NATO command – and give allies much more say in reconstruction and Iraq’s political process. Both shifts would be helpful, though there are no serious signs the administration is open to either. Yet even should the White House make such concessions the bulk of Iraq expenditures will still fall to us.

Iraq’s oil revenues (barely on line) won’t pay. The world won’t pay. This is America’s war, but the president won’t admit that America’s burden will be huge.

What makes this reticence so strange is the administration’s frequent comparison of rebuilding Iraq to the postwar reconstruction of Germany under the Marshall Plan. But, as Rachel Bronson of the Council on Foreign Relations points out, the Marshall Plan poured $79 billion in current dollars into Europe between 1948 and 1952, most of it in the first two years.

Yet in Iraq, key refineries and electric plants are still halted for want of spare parts. “It is simply unconscionable that debilitating power shortages persist in Iraq, turning Iraqi public opinion against the United States,” writes Kristol. “This is one of those problems that can be solved with enough money. And yet the money has not been made available. This is just the most disturbing example of a general pattern.”

Having been blasted by self-styled conservative readers for writing the same, I’m glad to see a neocon confront the problem. Republican senators are finally speaking up, also. But the president remains mum.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.