Lessons From the Rubble

The large flatbed truck did not look out of place as it approached the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad around 4:30 p.m. The compound had regular deliveries, and construction work had recently finished on a new brick fence ringing the former Canal Hotel. Fawzi Sirhan al-Hamdani, who was waiting for a friend outside the building, glimpsed the driver, a young, clean-shaven man wearing a T shirt. Another man in the compound's parking lot says the truck veered, as if looking for the right spot to stop. Then, say both men, it slammed into a corner of the building and exploded. Some 200 yds. away, Hussain Ali, who runs a soft-drink stand, dived to the floor as pieces of concrete came flying toward him. Inside the building, Mohammed al-Hakim, a driver with the International Monetary Fund, was standing in a second-floor office. "Everything seemed to be collapsing around me," al-Hakim says. "There was smoke everywhere. I saw a man lying with a bar of metal through his cheek."

If the driver of the truck was indeed looking for the right place to park, he chose carefully. The bomb exploded below the office of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian who was head of the U.N.'s mission in Iraq and one of the world's most respected diplomats. His corner of the building collapsed upon itself. U.S. soldiers, stripping down to T shirts in the heat, crawled into tiny crevices and under overhanging concrete slabs, washing away the dust from faces on the bodies they found, calling upon a U.N. official to identify the dead. By the end of the week, the death count had risen to 22, Vieira de Mello among them. Scores more were wounded.

The Baghdad bomb was the deadliest attack yet on foreign nationals since a U.S.-led force overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein in the spring. In Washington, some officials tried to frame the episode as a turning point that would ultimately bolster their cause. The bombing, said a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, "will go down as the defining moment in the war on terror. It's the civilized world vs. those who know no bounds of decency. I'm not trying to put a gloss on a bad day, but this was a desperate reaction to the real signs of progress."