US President George W. Bush has acknowledged problems in post-war Iraq and said the United States must respond more quickly to help new democracies.
"One of the lessons we learned from our experience in Iraq is that, while military personnel can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world, the same is not true of US government civilians," Mr Bush said in a speech to the International Republican Institute, which aims to promote democracy worldwide.
To remedy this, he cited an initiative in his budget that would create a corps of trained civilians who could be deployed on short notice to help in crises caused by war or revolution.
Critics have faulted the Bush administration for failing to properly plan for the occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.
Insurgents in Iraq recently stepped up their two-year campaign of violence, and more than 400 people have been killed since a new Iraqi government was named late last month.
Mr Bush said that recruiting and hiring people for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversaw Iraq's reconstruction before an interim government was formed last year, proved a "lengthy and difficult" process.
The president said he is proposing $100 million (€78.9 million) for a corps that will focus on post-conflict response globally and another $24 million for a group of foreign and civil service officers in Iraq that can respond to crises there.
Mr Bush, who once eschewed "nation-building," has made his call for the spread of democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere a major theme of his second term.
He returned last week from a trip to Europe where he hailed democratic change in ex-Soviet states such as Georgia and the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.