Baghdad ? America now has a 51st state. It’s called Iraq.

Around 1,000 U.S. civilians (backed by 150,000 troops) are running an Arab country of 24 million people. Americans are now responsible for everything from paying Iraqi civil servants to policing the streets to scheduling school exams next month.

An outfit called ORHA (Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance), headed by former State Department official Paul Bremer, is the new Iraqi government. I doubt many Americans have a clue about the size of the imperial burden that the Bush administration has taken on.

Saddam’s government was so centralized that it virtually collapsed when he was ousted. The bureaucracy remained, but U.S. officials have axed most of its upper levels by decreeing that 15,000 to 30,000 officials from Saddam’s Baath Party should be fired. Add to that the fact that most ministries were looted and burned.

Into this mess have come a mix of U.S. officials and Iraqi Americans in ORHA who now head Iraqi cabinet departments. I certainly don’t envy them their jobs.

Unlike the U.S. occupation of Japan, which was planned three years in advance (and involved 6,000 American civilians), ORHA was created only a few weeks before the war. Its staff has literally been prisoners of the palace, undercut by confusion in Washington and lack of resources. Ensconced in Saddam’s huge and bizarre presidential dwelling, an ode to marble pillars and faux-French settees, they lacked translators or basic means of communication (not to mention running water or air conditioning).

Until recently ORHA staff couldn’t even call one another, and it is still impossible to reach them by phone from outside. An ORHA press aide stands outside the main gate with a satellite phone (accessible only outdoors) so that frantic journalists can at least dial up a live voice.

ORHA staffers can’t call Iraqi government ministries and are blocked from easy interaction with Iraqis by the requirement that they must travel with a security detail. Only now is the Pentagon planning to give them a limited cell-phone network, and distribute cell phones to Iraqi ministries, so the U.S. bosses can communicate with Iraqi governmental departments.

Yet ORHA is supposed to be running Iraq.

Things have gotten better under Bremer, in large part because he was given a clearer mandate and more power by the White House than his predecessor, Jay Garner. In the week I have been here, more joint U.S. military/Iraqi police patrols have hit the streets, more stores have opened, and electricity comes on more often.

But the administration’s game plan to reshape Iraq is so ambitious that it dwarfs the inadequate resources assigned to ORHA. The White House was clearly unprepared for the scope of Iraqi looting, and it looks ill-prepared to make good on promises to bring democracy and prosperity to Baghdad. It is taking on much more than it can handle on its own.

Consider the consequences of two of Bremer’s biggest decisions.

First, the de-Baathification program: It sets a high moral tone, but its sheer size may undercut basic government operations. In the health sector, for example, the exit of top officials has paralyzed decision-making in the Health Ministry. Staffers of nongovernmental organizations talk of a crisis in public health clinics, which are running out of medicines even though government warehouses are full of drugs. The NGOs aren’t sure whether the problem is inept ORHA bureaucrats or an immobilized ministry — but what they’re sure of is that patients can’t get saline solution or even aspirin.

Second, the elimination of the Iraqi army. How daring to dismiss one of the Arab world’s largest armies, an army that once had a history of coup-making. But the end of the army means no income for a couple of million people in a comatose economy.

Col. Baha Nouri, an air defense commander who chose, along with fellow officers, not to fight the Americans, is bitter that the Americans won’t even pay pensions.

“Most of the army didn’t support Saddam,” he says, and putting all of them out of work will create instability and anger among a group that still has its weapons.

And I haven’t even talked about how ORHA will handle Iraq’s oil. Or how it will create jobs, in a country where most people depended on the government for income. Or whether former New York City police chief Bernard Kerik, brought in as an adviser, will have the time he says he needs to retrain the Iraqi police — in a country where people want security now.

Running Iraq is too big a job for a thousand isolated Americans to handle, even if they move out of the palace. ORHA needs an Iraqi governmental partner — and a lot more international input.

We don’t need a 51st state. When Bremer meets President Bush next week in Qatar, he should urge the President to rethink America’s colonial role.

— Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.