Sure-footed in winning the Iraq War, US President George W. Bush seems less certain about what to do now.

With casualties climbing and criticism growing, Bush is under intense pressure to do something different - something to stop the deaths of US soldiers, quell what are being described as acts of terrorism and turn on the electricity and water for frustrated Iraqis.

At home, Democrats and Republicans alike are demanding answers, and the approaching presidential campaign is piling on the pressure. Struggling for solutions, the administration is divided on some central points. In the meantime, US soldiers are dying at a rate of more than one a day.

The big questions are: What will it cost, how many troops will it take, who's going to help and how long will the United States occupy Iraq? The administration passed a sobering mark on Tuesday as the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein surpassed the number who died during the heavy fighting.

"Any objective assessment would say that they clearly need to adjust the policy," said James Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration. "I think they're divided as they have been typically on these things," he said, pointing to differences between Pentagon and State Department officials over whether to let other countries share control over the future of Iraq.

No one is willing to put a price tag on rebuilding Iraq, although L. Paul Bremer, the US occupation co-ordinator, told The Washington Post that "several tens of billions" of dollars would be needed from abroad to rebuild the shattered infrastructure and economy in the next year. US taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to pay the bill.

The administration is working on a supplemental budget request now but cannot say how much it will seek from Congress. "We don't have the numbers at this point and until we have responsible numbers we're not going to go to Congress," presidential spokeswoman Claire Buchan said on Wednesday.

US public confidence in Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped since the war but has levelled off in the around 50 percent, polls show. "They're not dropping like a rock but they're going in the wrong direction," said political scientist James Thurber. " Certainly Karl Rove and the president and others remember what happened to his father. He went from 91 percent to 38 percent in the polls" and lost his bid for re-election.

The bloodshed and uncertainty have emboldened Democratic presidential candidates to criticize Bush on Iraq. Even those who voted for the war now accuse Bush of not having a plan to bring peace to Iraq and say he is alienating allies who could be helping.

Last year, Bush returned to Washington from his August vacation and began to lay out his case for using military force in Iraq. Now, he is about to wind up this year's monthlong stay at his Texas ranch and Washington is wondering what he'll have to say about the post-war stage.

Key decisions have yet to be made, aides say, and Bush is giving only the vaguest clues about his decisions. While the details are still to come, administration officials argue that the president is clear about the broad direction of the policy when he says, "We're nowhere near a resolution on Iraq," UN Ambassador John Negroponte acknowledged.

Ruth Wedgwood, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said there is no easy answer for Iraq.

"There was no glad, happy post-war situation to be had," she said.

"If you're serious about the mission, you put your head down, you obviously lament every casualty that occurs," she said. "But this was a major strategic move for the next 20 years."

(China Daily August 29, 2003)