WASHINGTON: Getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime was a great blessing, but the war and its aftermath have had important unintended consequences for the Bush administration. Pre-emption policy toward “rogue states” has been eroded. The United Nations’ importance on security issues has been elevated. And in creating enormous new obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president has probably eliminated further serious use of an indispensable tool — nation-building — although, to be sure, it was a tool he never much cared for.

It’s hard to believe, after Iraq, that the American public would support a unilateral military engagement with a “rogue” state such as Iran on the basis of the potential harm that state might do. There is little public (or military) appetite for another extensive, pre-emptive use of the American military — something the administration will obviously bear in mind as election year draws near. Any notion that the United States can fight two large-scale pre-emptive wars at the same time is without basis.

This country may have the military capability, but it lacks the political wherewithal, unless the United States is itself attacked. The way the administration has, over the past eight months, put off resolving the far more threatening North Korea nuclear issue reflects both its dislike of Bill Clinton’s negotiating approach and its awareness of how politically difficult it is to manage two large crises at the same time. Washington is too often a one-crisis town, particularly when the president’s credibility is under attack.

The intelligence debacle reinforces the political difficulties of another pre-emptive effort. Although actual weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or greater evidence of Iraq’s WMD programmes may show up one day, it has become clear that the US intelligence agencies did not have much empirical evidence about Iraq’s programmes and that its judgments were essentially deductive, based on information accumulated from UN inspectors in Iraq in 1998.

The intelligence agencies went beyond a real knowledge of Iraq’s WMD programmes and holdings, and administration officials exaggerated that limited knowledge even further. This will fuel significant antiwar sentiment here and throughout the world should another case for pre-emptive war be presented, as there is bound to be uncertainty again. Our intelligence analysis system has been wounded, its integrity made suspect at home and abroad.

To say that this administration has been no fan of the United Nations is understatement. Senior officials frequently called the Iraq issue the last great test of the efficacy of the organization. So far as the administration was concerned, the United Nations not only failed the test but could not be entrusted with building the peace in Iraq.

But that was yesterday. The warm reception the president recently gave UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was a step toward reconciliation. It’s not surprising; the United States needs the United Nations more as pre-emption recedes and deficits rise.

We are in trouble in Iraq (and in Afghanistan, almost forgotten by the public). We need military help and we need money (for both). The administration is fanning out hat in hand. But many nations, even close friends, will not now provide it without either some UN benediction or a broad multilateral umbrella such as the World Bank. The administration may try to tough it out mostly alone to avoid embarrassment, but the American people like partners, and they increasingly do not like to bear all the costs. Internationalism has become a much more demanding necessity for the United States. This administration and succeeding ones will be more restrained about going to a pre- emptive war without a nod from the UN Security Council. Even the British will no longer join without it.

Finally, Bush has probably achieved, inadvertently, what he campaigned for: getting the United States out of nation-building. (As his national security adviser once put it: We don’t want our soldiers taking kids to kindergarten.) He has done this by embarking on nation-building unprecedented since World War II and in a land that we do not know well and that does not play to our strengths. And it was done, it is now clear, with little effective planning and with largely unexamined notions of what can be accomplished.

Public concern about our essentially solitary occupation of Iraq is rising. The major illumination for the administration to date has been the need to turn control over to the Iraqis as soon as possible, which could conceivably turn out to impede our exit. Talk that we are in it “as long as necessary and not a day more” has diminished.

It is too early to make any judgment on our occupation of Iraq. The killing of American soldiers almost every day is dismaying, but it does not necessarily convey the reality of the Iraq situation, and the American public has shown it can take casualties as long as it believes our effort makes sense. The American occupation may well turn out to have respectable results, although questions of political stability in Iraq will remain once the Americans depart.

But the idea that we would again take over another country essentially on our own seems politically out of the question for a long time to come. The administration already is less than enthusiastic in joining collective new efforts of a far more modest kind.

Empire is no rose garden.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.

(The writer, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, was assistant secretary of state for intelligence from 1985 to 1989)