Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

BAGHDAD – The narrative of American officialdom here, civilian and military alike, is that United States muscle is used merely in service of supporting Iraq’s fledgling democracy. Iraq’s leaders and soldiers are the ones responsible, and seek American support only as needed. That may be literally true, but the reaction to a botched weekend raid in a village north of the capital that left three men dead, none the targeted insurgent, laid bare another truth: In Iraq, where grievances run deep, America will still bear the brunt of the blame when things go wrong, even if the facts don’t completely align.

On Saturday news began filtering out of Al Rufait, the grape farming village near Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, that a nighttime operation conducted by Iraqi and American forces aimed at a suspected member of Al Qaeda had turned in to a shootout involving bullets, grenades and American Apache helicopters that left the tribal Sheik and two others dead, and several wounded, including two young girls.

A cloud of competing stories emerged, but the outrage from village residents and local officials was directed at the Americans, even though it was Iraq’s own security forces in charge of the mission, and Iraqi soldiers far outnumbered the amount of American boots on the ground, a United States military spokesman said.

Stories of American complicity in civilian deaths here are rare these days, and we made plans to head to the village the next morning. Before 8 a.m., two tribal leaders met us on the side of the main highway that connects the capital with the country’s north, and we followed their white pickup through winding roads that cut through vast green fields of grape vines. Visiting a village in the Sunni triangle suspected of having Al Qaeda sympathies on a day of anger toward a suspected American role in the killing of a respected tribal leader is a fraught exercise, and for only the second time of nearly a year in Iraq, I heard the metallic clank of one of our guards chambering a round in his assault rifle.

But the villagers were respectful, and just wanted to tell their story to a Western journalist, even if none of the customary tribal traditions such as a cup of chai were on offer. Surrounded by perhaps two dozen men, they took us through the village, recounting the raid and blaming the Americans. Not a cross word was said about Iraqi forces who the Americans said led the raid, nor of the Iraqi legal system, which had validated the raid with a judicial warrant.

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

“We will follow them to America and file cases there against them,” one of the villagers said. “There were more than 30 people here that saw what happened and all are ready to be witnesses.”

One tribal sheik, Youseff Ahmad, spoke about the debate about the future role of United States forces here that has dominated Iraqi public life of late. “We want them to leave, even before the end of this year,” Mr. Ahmad said. “They’ve destroyed us. They’ve only brought killing and disaster.”

The aftermath of the raid coincided with yet another visit from a top American military official, this time Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to nudge Iraq’s leaders to make a decision on whether an element of American forces should stay here beyond the end of the year, when an agreement between the countries requires them to leave. Even as most of Iraq’s top political and military leaders agree that American forces are still needed here to train the military and provide aerial surveillance and help with intelligence, they fear the political repercussions from a public in which many still consider the Americans occupiers even if, legally speaking, the occupation ended years ago.

Public remarks by Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric whose Sadrist movement is politically powerful, that he would reconstitute his militia if the Americans stay has in some ways masked a deeper anti-American sentiment that courses through Iraqi life, Sunni and Shiites alike. While the debate has sometimes been framed as the Sadrists being the sole voice against a continued United States troop presence, American diplomats, citing polls that aren’t public, say the majority of Iraqis have a negative view of the American role in Iraq.

On Tuesday, Admiral Mullen said “time is quickly running out” to make a decision. Earlier, in another illumination of the different notions of timekeeping in Washington and Baghdad, he visited in April and told the Iraqi government that it had “weeks” to decide.

That decision, and the demand by American diplomats that any agreement to keep United States forces here be ratified by Parliament to legally ensure immunities for troops, is made more difficult by the events on Saturday in Al Rufait.

The local press was full of accounts calling the raid and resulting deaths a “crime” perpetrated by the Americans, and on the floor of Parliament on Monday lawmakers used their pulpits to rail against the Americans.

Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni politician and the speaker of Parliament, said, “This was a clear violation and the killing of innocent people.” He called the incident a violation of the security agreement between Iraq and the United States.

Another member of Parliament, Mutashar al-Samarrai, read a passage from the Koran before giving a statement in which he accused American forces of executing the three village men after killing a dog and stealing money.

The Americans have declined to provide details of how the raid transpired beyond stating that forces fired back in self-defense. The facts are to be determined by an investigation led by the Iraqi government, but when they come the political damage could already be irreversible.