MIXED SIGNS

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq began with its March 19, 2003 cruise missile and bunker-busting bomb attack on the group of homes and a restaurant near Baghdad where U.S. military intelligence mistakenly thought Saddam was meeting his sons. Exactly five months later, based on its own more accurate intelligence, al-Qaeda in Iraq undertook a more consequetial attack. A flatbed truck packed with 1,000 pounds of explosives sped up an unguarded back road adjoining the UN headquarters and office of its chief envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

De Mello was conducting a meeting with International Monetary Fund officials about the humanitarian costs of the war. Earlier he had helped draft a memo criticizing the coalition's recent shootings of civilians, a key problem that continued throughout the war and that is the focal point of the last chapters of this book. Samantha Power reports that de Mello's last words – “oh, shit” – were uttered “seemingly more in resignation than surprise,” a split second after the explosion and the collapse of the building around him. De Mello bled to death under the rubble, one of twenty-one civilians killed in the blast (2008 :4).

That same month, an important cleric and political figure, Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim, was also killed by a massive bombing in Najaf. Within a year in this same center of religious leadership, U.S.-led forces would stage a brutal battle with Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This standoff, discussed in Chapter 4, would burnish al-Sadr's reputation as the head of the largest mass movement challenging the occupation. Violence was clearly rising. These increasingly violent attacks and counterattacks were turning points in a path-dependent process whose significance would become steadily more apparent in the months leading up to the end of the first year of the American presence in Iraq.