THE U.S. OCCUPATION of Iraq is still in its early stages. It is ludicrously premature to call it a failure, as some critics already do. Assuming that the United States and Britain keep their nerve in the face of growing guerrilla attacks, there is little doubt that they can still make good on George W. Bush's pledge, delivered in a speech on Tuesday, that "there will be no return to tyranny in Iraq" and that "those who threaten the order and stability of that country will face ruin, just as surely as the regime they once served".

But even if things ultimately work out well--and the odds are that they will--it is not too soon to ask what went wrong. This is not to cast blame but to do better in Iraq--and in the next country that needs to be rebuilt. Liberia, perhaps.

There is no question that the U.S. government was ill-prepared for the aftermath of a war well fought. Many facilities, such as electrical transformers and oil pumping stations that had been meticulously spared by the air campaign, were destroyed by looters and saboteurs. Many members of the old regime escaped and have come back to haunt the occupying authorities. Both problems have set the reconstruction process back.

The administration implicitly conceded that something was amiss early on when it sacked Jay Garner, a mild-mannered former general, and replaced him as viceroy with the tough-talking Paul Bremer. Garner complained that his outfit--the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance--had been hastily assembled

The lack of preparation is astounding not only because the Iraq invasion had been long foreseen but also because America and its allies have run so many similar nation-building exercises in recent years: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Yet there has been little attempt to apply the lessons of those places in Iraq.

Part of the explanation may be the Bush administration's habitual--and deeply counter-productive--distrust of "nation-building," which many on the right wrongly view as liberal muddle-headedness. But even those in government who realize that the United States has an interest in bringing stability to war-ravaged lands were handicapped by the lack of an institutional framework for dealing with the issue.

Take law enforcement. Robert Perito, a former U.S. foreign service officer who has worked in Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo, says there is a critical need to create a federal constabulary to monitor law and order in postwar environments. The U.S. army, most of whose military police are in the reserves, is ill-prepared for the task. It does not have enough crowd control equipment, for instance, so troops end up firing into unruly mobs. A federal constabulary along the lines of the Italian carabinieri could take charge of crowd control, anti-terrorist operations, and other functions until international civil police arrive and a local police force can be set up.