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An Iraq in which international civil servants are murdered is not a success--which added to the urgency of finding out who was responsible for the Baghdad bomb. A hitherto unknown body called the Armed Vanguard of Muhammad's Second Army claimed responsibility, but it was simply impossible to know if the group even existed, let alone whether it had carried out the attack. In the days following the explosion, everyone from top Administration officials to Pentagon brass to the cottage industry of experts on terrorism to coffeehouse and bazaar gossips in Baghdad itself offered opinions on the perpetrators. It was Baathists; or members of Fedayeen Saddam; or the U.N.'s own security guards; or remnants of Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group supposedly routed in the war; or al-Qaeda; or foreign jihadists who have flocked to Iraq; or a noxious combination of all the above. Treat every such opinion as if it carried a health warning. The plain truth is that nobody knows who is responsible for atrocities like the Baghdad bomb. Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S.'s top soldier in Iraq, has often said the thing he lacks most is not more men but better intelligence. Asked how many foreign jihadists might have entered Iraq, a senior White House official was honest enough to admit, "I don't think we really have a good sense of what the numbers are. It is the nature of the beast that you don't know what you're looking at. I think it's really too early to speculate as to what foreign forces are there."
Still, some things are known. Thomas Victor Fuentes, the FBI's top agent in Iraq, told reporters that between 1,000 and 1,500 lbs. of explosives were used in the blast. Mortar and artillery shells were bundled around a 500-lb. bomb. The munitions were all military grade, imported from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials believe that the bomb was a suicide attack (though even that is not absolutely certain), which could be telling. Baath Party and Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas have not used suicide bombs before. "It's not part of the Iraqi culture, military or political," says Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a retired general of the Iraqi special forces. But Ansar al-Islam, which was driven from its base at the northeastern border with Iran during the war, used suicide attacks last spring near Halabja, and an Iraqi intelligence officer working with the CIA says, "Our feeling is that Ansar are the most likely ones, even if it was financed or supported by someone else."