So Who the Heck is Guarding Iraq?

Cowboys, Walter Mittys and Posers, That's Who

By: Patrick Cockburn

A former British officer watching a group of private security men working for an American company in the Green Zone in Baghdad was struck by their apparent lack of professionalism as they guarded an Iraqi politician. Moving closer, he recognised the face of one of the guards and, to the man's dismay, greeted him by name. "He used to be an assistant barman in a pub just outside our base in Britain," the officer told me. "He must have listened to so many soldiers chatting that he was able to pretend to be one of them and talk his way into a highly paid job in a security company."

By 2007 the Pentagon estimated that there were 126,000 commercial security personnel working in Iraq. It is a new industry. There always were plenty of well-trained ex-soldiers working for security companies in the 1990s, but it was the invasion of Iraq which led to an extraordinary explosion in their number.

They were a bizarre looking lot. "Not only did they wear body armour on top of their clothing and flash weapons for all to see," writes Bob Shepherd in The Circuit, his fascinating memoir about the security industry, "but many of them were obviously on steroids, wore sunglasses indoors... and had pistols and knives strapped to their legs."

Still, no Western company could work in Iraq without protection. Iraqi politicians and businessmen were also rightly frightened of assassins and kidnappers and did not trust fellow Iraqis. It all meant a gold rush for the security industry. I would often see their vehicles, weapons pointing from every window, careering through the traffic in Baghdad, forcing Iraqis off the road. Once I visited a hospital when the dean of Baghdad University, a distinguished doctor, had been shot in the stomach and his driver killed by nervous Western security men.

Shepherd's modest, closely observed and revealing work on his job providing security for CNN explains how this new type of security industry developed. He does not

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