authorities and Iraqi politicians. The killing of Vieira de Mello and his colleagues
dispirited the United Nations, which subsequently pulled most of its staff from Iraq.
The incident is widely viewed as a turning point in Iraq’s descent into chaos. Another
step in that direction occurred ten days later, when the bombing of a mosque in the
southern city of Najaf killed more than eighty people, including Ayatollah Muham-
mad Bakir al-Hakim. One of Iraq’s leading Shiite clerics, with ties to Iran, Hakim had
expressed a willingness to work with the U.S. occupation to achieve greater rights for
Iraq’s Shiite majority. His death removed an important moderating influence at a cru-
cial moment.
Back to the United Nations
Shaken by the August bombings and similar events, the Bush administration returned
to the United Nations with the hope of obtaining more military and political support
from the international community for its occupation of Iraq. It made the appeal a few
months after President George W. Bush had scorned the Security Council, which he
had accused of not having “lived up to its responsibilities” because of its failure to
endorse the U.S.-led invasion.
After several weeks of negotiations in September and early October 2003, the
administration won agreement on a resolution that endorsed the U.S. occupation of
Iraq, committed the United Nations to helping with Iraq’s political transition, and
called on other countries to contribute financial and military assistance to Iraq. The
Security Council endorsed this measure, Resolution 1151, on October 16, 2003, by
a unanimous vote.
Although this resolution served as the model for subsequent ones authorizing a
continued international presence in Iraq, it did not inspire other countries to send sol-
diers to ease the U.S. military burden there, as the Bush administration had hoped.
U.S. officials asked India, Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries with large Muslim
populations to contribute troops to the new UN-endorsed coalition in Iraq, but all
refused. Over the course of later years, other countries that had provided small con-
tingents of troops for the invasion and occupation of Iraq decided to pull out. By
2007, only the United States and Britain maintained sizable military forces there, but
even the British government was planning to withdraw most of its remaining 7,000
troops in the near future.
Governing Iraq
The U.S. assumption that governing Iraq would be a straightforward matter also failed
the test of reality. To the extent the Bush administration had a governance plan, it
involved stationing a small group of American advisors in Baghdad who would work
with Iraqi exiles and known moderates from the various domestic constituencies to
establish a new government that would call elections, thereby implanting democracy.
This plan survived only a few weeks before being superseded in May 2003 by another
one, in which a full-scale occupation authority—the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA)—would run Iraq and help select a new Iraqi government. Former U.S. diplo-
mat L. Paul Bremer III headed the CPA and had almost unlimited powers to govern
Iraq as he saw fit. An advisory body, the Iraqi Governing Council, served alongside
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