It’s not as if one is ever particularly eager to spend $87 billion. After all, $87 billion is, to use the technical term favored by those who move in the world of high finance, a whole bunch of money.

Still, I must confess that I find it rather frustrating to discover that most Americans are against spending that much for the rebuilding of Iraq. Six in 10 of us, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, oppose President Bush’s funding request, unveiled in a nationally televised speech Sunday before last.

If the pollsters are to be believed, we the people prefer to do our nation building on the cheap.

It’s not that I don’t understand the reasoning. The states are cash-strapped, our infrastructure is crumbling, jobs are hard to come by, the federal budget is bleeding red ink and the economy is moving with all the fleet grace of an arthritic hippo.

Not only do I understand the reasoning, but at some level, I agree with it.

Here’s the thing, though: all of the above was equally true back in March when American forces first began pounding Iraq, back when we supported the invasion by an even larger margin than the one by which we now oppose paying to repair the damage it caused. Americans supported the war fervently, even though the rationale behind it seemed dubious at the time and, in the intervening months, has only grown more so.

Tell me again why this trip was necessary? Saddam Hussein represents an imminent threat, said the White House. A threat, maybe. But imminent? There was little concrete evidence of that.

Then there was the argument that the Iraqi dictator was hiding weapons of mass destruction. But if indeed he was, those weapons sure have proven elusive.

Finally, there was the broadly hinted notion that Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11. This week, the White House admitted what its critics have long claimed — that Saddam had no role in the terrorist attacks. Still, most of us continue to believe he was somehow involved.

Truth is, many Americans were so hot for war that we hardly seemed to need a reason. So hot, in fact, that we could scarcely tolerate anyone who wasn’t. To raise a question about what we were doing, much less risk a criticism of it, was deemed by some a treasonable offense.

Now the bill comes due. It finds the president seemingly caught off guard and the people balking, even though the cost was eminently predictable. Like it says on the sign in the five and dime: you break it, you buy it. We broke a lot of stuff in Iraq.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have thought about what would happen once the breaking was done.

It’s hard to escape a nagging sense that time has telescoped on us, events moving at a bewildering speed that dares us to keep pace. We have gone from debate to deployment to invasion to victory to liberation to occupation to reconstruction.

All this in a single year. And it is not yet October.

But it’s not as if we can wait for events to slow down any time soon. Once we crossed the border into Iraq, slowing down — much less turning back — ceased to be an option. The only thing that might have damaged American prestige and moral authority more than invading Iraq would have been to invade and lose.

Similarly, the only thing worse than hammering that nation into rubble would be to leave it that way. As things now stand, the Iraqis are, putting it mildly, divided about the American occupation of their country. How quickly would division become solid opposition, how much more of a seedbed for anti-American extremism would that region become, if we were to turn away now and leave the nation in a state of anarchy and disrepair?

We find ourselves trapped in a paradox of our own making. We can’t afford to rebuild Iraq. And we can’t afford not to.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.