Before the war, we were promised by the Bush administration that Iraqi oil revenues would finance the bulk of their reconstruction. Here’s Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on 3/27/03:

The oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years”¦We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

Now we are being told that the oil revenues might not pay for any of the reconstruction – it’s completely up to the Iraqis. Scott McClellan today:

QUESTION: Iraq’s reconstruction costs — how much of that should be paid for by Iraq with its oil revenues?

MCCLELLAN: Well, Iraq’s oil revenues are for the Iraqi people. It is overseen by an Iraqi ministry and all those revenues go to help the Iraqi people.

McClellan later instructs the reporter to look for the National Strategy for Victory In Iraq because it “talks about the oil sector and the progress that’s being made there.” Actually, that document acknowledges “oil production is slightly down from a year ago.”

Maybe it’s appropriate for the United States to finance Iraqi reconstruction, but the administration should have been upfront with the American people from the beginning. U.S. taxpayers have already spent $18 billion on Iraqi reconstruction, with no end in sight.

In his speech this morning, President Bush blamed the media for ignoring the “quiet, steady progress” of reconstruction efforts in Iraq:

This is quiet, steady progress. It doesn’t always make the headlines in the evening news. But it is real and it is important. And it is unmistakable to those who see it close-up.

Afterwards, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews endorsed the remarks:

David Gregory, I was impressed again by the fact that he was taking a shot at the media, saying you are not going to hear about this economic development progress on the evening news.

Of course, it’s easy for Chris Matthews to bemoan the particulars of Iraq coverage from his Washington television studio. The truth is, the same problem that’s hampering Iraq’s reconstruction is also preventing journalists from covering the occassional openings of schools and hospitals: unrelenting insurgent violence. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief, explains:

I would posit that a lot of these projects — people say, oh, why didn’t you cover the opening of this new power station in Mahmudiyah? Well, it’s “the triangle of death.” You know, as a bureau chief there, I wasn’t going to risk putting my people’s lives on the line to go down for a photo op. As nice as it might have been, it’s simply too unsafe to get around and tell a lot of these stories. And so a lot of the coverage is, unfortunately, skewed by the fact that the on-the-ground realities of committing journalism in Iraq are such that you really can’t get out and do much of anything.

The important issue here isn’t press coverage — it’s that the Bush administration’s military strategy in Iraq is failing.