Private security operators now make up the third largest armed force in Iraq, Paul McGeough writes from Baghdad.
When the doors open at Level 5 of the Palestine Hotel, there's a spit-and-polished Gurkha pointing a high-powered gun into the lift.
The whole floor and another above it have been taken by Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction wing of Halliburton, one of the biggest US firms working in Iraq. And though the linguists of occupation don't allow the word "mercenary", the Gurkha is part of a 15,000-strong private security operation that is the third biggest armed force in Iraq.
Their numbers - and salaries as high as $US1000 ($A1300) a day - attest to the danger of this Arab version of Dodge City.
But when they signed up, few would have anticipated the terrible butchery of four colleagues whose bodies were dismembered and dragged through the streets of the western city of Fallujah on Wednesday.
Television footage of the scene - heavily edited before going to air worldwide - showed their corpses being kicked and stoned before being broken up with blows from steel rods.
At least two of them were strung up on a bridge and parts of the other bodies were stuck on poles and paraded around town.
The barbarity at Fallujah provoked outrage in Washington and elsewhere - but did little to change US rhetoric on the pacification of post-war Iraq.
The ranks of the private armies in Iraq are growing so rapidly that US and British defence officials are at a loss to know how to counter offers to the best of their Special Operations and SAS staff.
In the mayhem, Baghdad has been carved into a series of Western security bubbles. There is the Green Zone, American proconsul Paul Bremer's sprawling bunker for which the Pentagon is about to let a $100 million privatised security contract; foreign embassies are grouping and fortifying; and western business and the foreign media have all but withdrawn behind concrete, wire and guns.
Pity the poor Iraqis. They're outside the walls and at the other end of the guns, unprotected from bombers and criminals who have run amok, robbing and kidnapping in a security vacuum in which it is nigh on impossible for a naive new Iraqi police force to control.
And it's not just the foreigners - South Africans, who know they are breaking their country's laws on mercenary activity; skilled Gurkhas and Fijians who can't resist the dollars; or the Chileans who trained under General Pinochet - who are involved.
Beneath all of that is a dubious layer of Iraqi-run security - hundreds of local firms that have the capacity to become clan-based militias if, as some expect, security worsens after the June 30 hand-back of sovereignty to an Iraqi administration.
This is what happens: An Iraqi working with a new foreign media or business sees the opening, recruits 30 or 50 family and friends to whom he gives guns and the ubiquitous baseball cap and then he bids for the security contract.
