Ten years ago today the U.S. launched its military invasion of Iraq. For Americans, there will be no official commemoration of this event, which still raises a lot of unanswered and uneasy questions. 

In Iraq, the anniversary was marked by a series of explosions that killed more than 50 people in Shi'ite neighborhoods around Baghdad. It's only the most recent example of the sectarian violence that's been part of Iraq's landscape since the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein, the country's brutal former dictator.

All this week, we're looking back to the start of that war, which lasted more than eight years and claimed the lives of well over 100 thousand soldiers and civilians. Yesterday, we heard from Southern California veterans and a photojournalist about their experiences during the early days of the war.

Today, we look back at what happened in the first year after the invasion, as Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority sought to create a new Iraqi government.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran was the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post in 2003 and 2004, and he's the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone."