19 August will mark the anniversary of a date that is seared forever in my memory. It was a blisteringly hot late summer afternoon in 2003 when a jihadist suicide bomber drove a flatbed truck carrying more than a ton of explosives into our UN headquarters in Iraq (the Canal Hotel), killing twenty-two staff members and visitors, and wounding more than one-hundred fifty others, including my wife, who was then working for the World Food Program. The terrible event left permanent psychological and emotional scars from which complete recovery seems unlikely.

World-famous UN Under-Secretary General Sergio Vieira de Mello died in the attack. Often considered a frontrunner for the UN’s most senior post, De Mello was then acting as a political envoy to Iraq for the Secretary General (SG). He

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