Just back from a month covering the bloody aftermath of the war in Iraq, veteran television news correspondent Dave Marash said the Bush administration must commit more time, money, and troops so that "a plausible nation-state is let loose on the world."

If not, he said, "the consequences of failure are too great."

Seated comfortably at the dining room table in his Montclair home 48 hours after returning from Baghdad, Marash told NJ Jewish News it would take "several hundred thousand troops," between two and five years, and a vast investment in public works and job creation programs to create a viable economy from one that is now in near ruin.

Such proposals, he said, may not be popular at the White House or in many quarters of Congress.  "The present policy, which is classic Republican in many ways, is that governance should be as budget-constrained as possible, and the distribution of services is a secondary priority to budget constraint. The postwar effort is underfunded," said Marash.

"I think we need more people, we need more troops, and we need a faster flow of investment money and job money. It is anathema to conservative Republicans, but something of a New Deal hiring program might be one of the first priorities in Iraq," he said, considering the country now has "50 percent unemployment."

For the month of June, Marash and his team from ABC News turned a small hotel in a working-class Baghdad neighborhood into a production center, where he expanded his usual assignment as a Nightline correspondent by also filing reports for World News Tonight and Good Morning America.

Aside from a "one-night stand" embedded at an American military base near Fallujah, where Saddam Hussein loyalists continue attacking, Marash said he separated himself from U.S. troops as he moved through potentially hostile territory in the "Sunni Crescent" north and west of the capital.

He found the scene far less dangerous than those he covered in times of combat in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Congo, and he discovered a "psychological difference" in the way an embedded journalist covers Iraq.

"You are living with and being protected by people and so you bond with them. Part of your job is to be able to simultaneously bond and report honestly on people, but sometimes that's difficult," said Marash.

"Sometimes your friendship gets you to – see from their point of view events that you might — if you weren't so embedded with and so dependent on them — view a little bit more objectively."

Marash believes that the government's unwillingness to spend money on social programs is one of several miscalculations that are damaging the "resuscitation of Iraq."

"My feeling is that the administration approached it in a somewhat negligent and cavalier manner. The collapse of Baghdad happened much faster than we thought. We thought there was going of be a long, drawn-out battle for Baghdad and incremental control would be achieved over that period. Instead, the war was over, and we were unprepared to take over and unprepared for the level of sabotage and looting and destruction of the infrastructure.

"Clearly the most organized part of the resistance by Saddam Hussein's regime was to try to leave the occupiers with as little functioning infrastructure as possible, and we weren't prepared for it," Marash continued.

"I think one of the things to become clear in the manufactured misperception of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction was that he was a madman who couldn't be judged by ordinary standardsÉ. He was the sort of man who would 'do a Samson' and use chemical weapons and bring the wrath of the whole world down upon his disintegrating state." Saddam's regime, said Marash, did, however, have a scientific "knowledge base" with the potential to create chemical and biological weapons.

To Marash, the near daily attacks on American troops come partly from an "armed resistance by desperate" people, many of whom are being blacklisted from work because of their past affiliations with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

Some of them, he said, "probably earned the exclusion – but the majority of the membership below the top ranks were not ideologically devoted."

"Long phase after"

Marash said that the active phase of the war was an easier story to report than the "long phase after that that is slow, is complex, and is more painful and more important than the war itself." And yet, he said, even during the post-combat phase, most American television outlets would rather report on individual acts of violence than on less dramatic actions in rebuilding a war-torn nation.

"Those long-range, very subtle, very nuanced, very slow-moving stories get drowned out by this terrible murder, that bad ambush, this clamorous raid. But the American people are concentrating on the horror of each death," especially each American death.

When civilians are killed in postwar battling, it adds to Iraqi disaffection with the American effort.

But, he said, that could be overcome by meeting the medical and economic needs of a people who have suffered from war and poverty and with crime problems that range from high-scale sabotage to lower-impact looting.

It will be possible to establish a democratic state slowly in Iraq, Marash argued, and it may not be a theocratic carbon copy of its Shi'ite neighbor in Iran.

Among the Shi'ia, who hold a numerical majority in Iraq, there are two Islamist parties representing some 40 percent of the vote.

But more moderate ayatollahs who believe in a "more modern, progressive state," said Marash, have potential influence over more than half their disciples.

For some 30 years, Marash has been a witness to wars and civil strife as both a network correspondent and a local anchorman in New York and Washington, DC.

He believes that with the proper commitment, the American effort can succeed in Iraq.

"I think that Iraq's being an Islamic country puts some limits on how completely people's hearts and minds are going to cohere. On the other hand, my feeling is that most people get it, that Saddam is over, the Americans are here and are, for better or for worse are running things." If the Iraqis "figure how to do the dance, the American presence will be good for them. I think the Iraqis are going to spend the next year and a half learning how to do that dance.

And in the next three years, said Marash, "as the training wheels come off and the Iraqis learn to self-administer, a state that is genuinely civil, genuinely stable, and genuinely secure will emerge."

Robert Wiener can be reached at .