The motives for the attack on the UN are as murky as the identity of its authors, writes Lara Marlowe.
The FBI agents who sifted through the still burning, pancaked ruins of the UN headquarters at the Canal Hotel didn't find much of the suicide bomber who killed 24 people, including the UN special envoy to Iraq: only a pair of hands and feet in the wreckage of the explosives-laden truck.
It was not enough to enable the Americans to fulfil their usual promise to track down and punish the perpetrators, but the eagerness for self-sacrifice implied they were Islamic fundamentalists rather than die-hard Baathists. Or, more chillingly, the former aided by the latter.
Allegations of links between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime were a US argument for invading Iraq. Evidence of such collusion was even shakier than that concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now the US occupation of Iraq may have forged such an alliance.
There are an estimated 350,000 surviving members of Saddam's security forces; a small fraction of that number could be responsible for the daily attacks on US troops and the sabotage of oil, water and electrical installations that have plagued the first four months of US occupation. The Baathists could easily have kept the ordnance used to destroy the UN headquarters: a 500lb Soviet-era bomb, artillery shells, mortar rounds and grenades, skilfully packed into a lorry and detonated.
President George W. Bush predictably condemned the Canal Hotel murderers as "enemies of the civilised world" and "terrorists" who showed "their contempt for the innocent . . . their fear of progress and their hatred of peace." Bush's man in Iraq, the US administrator Paul Bremer, provided a more specific list of "terrorist" suspects in an interview with al-Hayat newspaper, the day before the bombing.
Even the capture or killing of Saddam would not end violence in Iraq, Bremer admitted. Attacks on US forces and Iraqi infrastructure were the work of loyalists in Saddam's militia, he said, of Islamic fundamentalists opposed to a foreign presence in Iraq, and of Arab volunteers who had flocked to Iraq via Syria to fight in the war.
Since the fall of Saddam, US officials claim, the opportunity to attack Americans has acted as a magnet for Islamic militants from neighbouring Saudi Arabia. European journalists in Baghdad were recently handed pamphlets claiming credit for attacks on behalf of al-Qaeda.
The motives for the attack on the UN are nearly as murky as the identity of its authors. Bremer suggested Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy, was targeted for assassination. But the former hotel in Canal Street had been the UN headquarters for most of the past decade and was poorly protected by Iraqi guards. A simpler explanation is that it was an easy target, certain to seize the world's attention.
On July 17th, before the Security Council, de Mello stressed the UN operation in Baghdad was "vulnerable" and its security relied "mainly on its reputation". He had ordered UN personnel not to leave their lodgings after 8 p.m. The 4.30 p.m. attack was timed just before Iraqi employees left for the day, when UN officials usually held meetings.
After Tuesday's attack, there were conflicting reports about US responsibility for protecting the UN's 646 expatriates and 2,500 Iraqi employees. Louise Fréchette, an under-secretary general of the UN, told Le Monde that US forces had deployed troops outside the UN complex to ensure security there.
The Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was surprised by reports that the UN had refused US protection because it feared being too closely identified with the occupying power. "That kind of decision should not be left to the protected," Annan said in a rare criticism of the US. "It is those who have responsibility for security and law and order, who have intelligence, who determine what action is taken. I don't know if the UN did turn down an offer of protection, but if it did, it was not correct, and they should not have been allowed to turn it down."
The US involvement in Iraq is already being compared with Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As in Vietnam, America is losing the battle for the "hearts and minds" of an elusive "Iraqi people". The deployment of young, tired, frightened soldiers with no preparation for peace-keeping was not the least of the Pentagon's errors. Shooting on sight, arbitrary searches, arrest and imprisonment under inhumane conditions are well documented abuses that alienate more Iraqi civilians daily. And whatever their methods, the 138,000 US troops now in Iraq are too few to control a country the size of France.
But the single greatest failing of US forces in Iraq has been their inability to restore security, water and electricity.
In the Middle East, the Iraqi quagmire is compared more to Lebanon than Vietnam. On April 9th, the day Saddam's regime fell, barricades went up in the streets of Baghdad, erected by middle-class Sunnis to prevent poor Shiites from looting their houses. Neighbourhood barricades were the way the Lebanese civil war started.
Like Lebanon, there has been a steady progression in Iraq from shootings and rocket propelled grenade attacks to car bombs and suicide bombings; the main difference being the speed with which the Iraq conflict is escalating. It took years for the divided Lebanese to turn on the foreigners who tried to help them, only a few months in Iraq. How long, one wonders, before Iraqis begin taking Westerners hostage? How long before the country's ethnic and religious mosaic splinters into warring Kurds, Sunnis and Shia? In the past, Iraqis repeatedly united to drive out foreign (usually British) invaders, only to turn on each other when that was accomplished. The Shia majority, though opposed to the US presence, have been surprisingly quiet. The attack on the Canal Hotel was the worst disaster to strike the UN since its foundation in 1945, but paradoxically it has elicited calls for a stronger UN role from people such as the former UN high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson. Kofi Annan has risen to the occasion by refusing to withdraw UN personnel from Iraq.
The tragic death of de Mello, one of the finest international civil servants ever produced by the UN system, gave impetus to his desire for a broader UN mandate in Iraq. The manner of his death, with his legs pinned beneath a concrete beam, talking on his cell phone and asking a guard for water, is haunting. When the guard finally reached him, AFP quoted a witness, "the body of Sergio Vieira de Mello was cold".
An elegant, perpetually smiling veteran of conflicts in Lebanon and Bosnia, Vieira de Mello prevented Hutus being massacred by revenge-seeking Tutsis in Rwanda, repatriated 370,000 Cambodian refugees from Thailand and oversaw the independence of East Timor from Indonesia. He was considered Kofi Annan's heir apparent as Secretary General.
"I can think of no one we could less afford to spare, or who would be more acutely missed throughout the United Nations system, than Sergio," Annan said. "Those who killed him have committed a crime, not only against the United Nations, but against Iraq itself."
The US journalist Malcolm Gladwell brought the term "tipping point" into common usage last year, with a book of the same title. As US soldiers, FBI agents and UN employees continued the macabre search for bodies, there was an ill-articulated but powerful feeling that Iraq may have reached its tipping point. No one advocates abandoning Iraq to the Canal Street killers. But that doesn't make it easier to impose the right direction.