The more money spent on Iraq and the more American soldiers killed there, the clearer it becomes that the Bush administration vastly overestimated the ease with which reconstruction could be accomplished.

It remains to be seen whether it can be accomplished at all. President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld may have been brilliant in the execution of the war, but it is now evident that the task of nation-building they have stumbled into is going to be overwhelmingly difficult to pull off, particularly with a skeptical U.N. refusing to offer significant financial support.

Spurring international distaste is the glaring fact that a massive CIA-led search has yielded no weapons of mass destruction and no firm conclusions about the likelihood that they will be found. Unless it can be shown that they existed, the entire justification for the war – and, by extension, the occupation – collapses. Freeing the oppressed Iraqis and establishing a “democratizing” Iraq – to use Condoleezza Rice’s word – should not be accepted as valid reasons. North Korea and Iran are equally repressive and are known to possess weapons of mass destruction, yet we hear no rhetoric about the absolute necessity of invading them.

If, as it appears, no weapons are going to be found, then the intelligence was questionable at best and the war was therefore based on the assumption that Saddam Hussein had them or weapons capability. At the same time, the administration has admitted that there was no known connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. Presumably, Bush feared Saddam might support al-Qaida at some future point. Thus, the war was not a last resort, whatever the rhetoric. Bush traded a hypothetical future threat for the very real threats of increasingly broad-based anti-occupation opinion in Iraq, strong anti-American fervor worldwide and the increasing popularity of Middle East terrorist groups.

The decision to go to war in Iraq represented a major overestimation of U.S. power and an underestimation of the importance of multilateralism in the war on terror. We are paying the price for that overestimation as we embark on a dubious reconstruction effort with little international support.