Foreign contracts by British private security firms are now worth about £1bn a year, according to the companies.

The extent of their activities, and the way governments are either indulging or ignoring them, were highlighted at a conference in London in which the companies admitted that what has become known as the largest private army in the world had a serious image problem.

However, there is a lack of reliable information about the companies' activities. Speakers at the conference of the British Association of Private Security Companies claimed that what they described as the "Iraqi bubble" had burst and there may now be only 10,000 private guards in Iraq.

Andrew Bearpark, the association's director general, said the number of private security company employees killed in Iraq was a "quite staggering" 827, and added that the figure could be an underestimate.

Aegis and Control Risks are among British companies whose employees have been killed in Iraq. The British military reported yesterday that a roadside bomb killed three people travelling in a private security company convoy near Basra.

Mr Bearpark, a former chief of staff to Lady Thatcher, said the activities of private security companies had increased tenfold since the 1991 Gulf war. He insisted that the companies believed in regulation but the UK government had not come up with any proposal since a green paper on the issue four years ago. In the meantime, he said, the companies would appoint an independent ombudsman to investigate claims of abuse by employees.

The government admits that private security companies are here to stay, and that their operations are likely to increase further as pressures on the armed forces increase. Yet it is keeping the companies at arm's length, apparently concerned about dealing with "mercenaries". The companies, meanwhile, are desperate to shake off what they insist is an outdated and misleading moniker. Their tasks, they say, range from protecting individuals and convoys to "post-conflict reconstruction".

Critics say the main problem is that they are unaccountable. Non-Iraqi employees of private security companies in Iraq were protected from prosecution under Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued shortly before it handed over power in 2004.

War on Want said yesterday that civilian contractors - including men named in US military reports as having carried out abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison - have repeatedly escaped prosecution. The charity pointed to a report by US army general Antonio Taguba which stated that two workers employed by private defence companies CACI International Inc and Titan Corp were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib".

The charity also cited a video distributed on the internet which purported to show Aegis contractors firing at Iraqi civilian vehicles, to a soundtrack of Elvis Presley's song Mystery Train. A US military investigation cleared Aegis of any offence.

Geoffrey Dennis, chief executive of the humanitarian agency Care International UK, expressed concerns that in Afghanistan and Iraq the lines between security and aid were being blurred.

"When the military and private security companies get involved in so-called 'quick-impact projects', they are frequently ineffective, inappropriate, and short-termist," he said. "This is because they are based on a different agenda - either political or military - rather than on the need for sustainable reconstruction."

Hired guns

British private security companies have contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan worth £1bn. There are 48,000 employees of private security firms in Iraq - 21,000 of them British - according to War on Want. The total has now dropped to 10,000, British companies say. Aegis, which won a multimillion pound contract from the Pentagon to provide security in Iraq, saw its turnover increase from £500,000 in 2003 to £62m last year. ArmorGroup, a British company, trebled its turnover from £37m in 2001 to £122m. In Afghanistan, 150 employees of the US company DynCorp are protecting president Hamid Karzai. Blackwater has won contracts in Iraq and to combat opium cultivation in Afghanistan. Control Risks has contracts with UK and US agencies, including the Foreign Office, to provide security in Iraq.

A spokesman for Warner said the Virginia Republican read the report over the weekend in preparation for a meeting today with Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons - almost 4% of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and other weapons it has been supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003.

The missing weapons cannot be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided - less than 3%.

Missing from the department's inventory were 13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns.

Many weapons that are not missing cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are unavailable.

The inspector general's office released its report Sunday in a series of three audits.

A second audit says that "significant challenges remain that put at risk" the U.S. military's goal of strengthening Iraqi security forces by transferring all logistics operations to the Defense Ministry by the end of 2007.

The audit says there is a "significant risk" that the Iraqi Interior Ministry "will not be capable of assuming and sustaining logistics support for the Iraqi local and national police forces in the near term."

That support includes equipment maintenance, transportation and health resources for soldiers and police.

A third audit says, "The unstable security environment in Iraq touches every aspect" of the Provincial Reconstruction Team program.

The audit says that, because of security issues, the teams "have varying degrees of ability to carry out their missions." Auditors reviewed nine teams and four satellite offices and found that "four were generally able, four were somewhat able, three were less able and two were generally unable" to accomplish their goals.

On 15 October, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Muslim, pledged in a nationally televised address to crack down on militias. "The state and the militias cannot coexist. Arms can only be in the hands of the government and no one has the right to be above the law," al-Maliki said.

However, analysts say that government rhetoric is not being matched by action. "He [al-Maliki] has issued repeated statements against illegal armed groups, but he is not able to take any concerted action against these militias because of their political weight in his government," said Emad al-Janabi, a Baghdad-based political sciences professor at the University of Mosul.

Therefore, they say, the advantages of deadlines may outweigh the drawbacks.

"Deadlines could help ensure that the Iraqi leaders recognize the imperative of coming to grips with the tough decisions they've got to make for there to be progress in the political arena," said a senior Army officer who has served in Iraq. He asked that his name not be used because he did not want to publicly disagree with the stated policy of the president.

Former Pentagon official Kurt Campbell said more officers are calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of U.S. forces enables the Shiite-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.

"There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems," said Campbell, coauthor of a book on national security policy. "We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level."

For months, the Bush administration has been politely prodding the Iraqis on political and security reforms including the sharing of oil revenue, a crackdown on Shiite militias and constitutional changes. The discussions so far have yielded little, prompting experts to question whether the Iraqi government will ever compromise if there is no penalty for failing to make hard choices.

Over the last week, Bush administration officials have spoken about possible timetables for progress in Iraq, but softened their suggestions after talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

Although top administration officials are still steering clear of discussing the timing of American troop withdrawals, the officers' comments come alongside public statements by prominent Republicans who have begun talking about the need to establish a date that the U.S. will begin to draw down, whether or not the Iraqi government takes steps toward political compromise.

President Bush and other administration opponents of hard deadlines have argued that telegraphing troop departures would help the insurgents.

Once the U.S. sets a withdrawal date, the Sunni-led guerrillas know how long they must hang on before American troops are gone, the administration has argued.

Opponents of timetables also fear that small drawdowns will unleash public demand for more dramatic withdrawals, allowing violence fomented by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to erode whatever political advances have been made.

Military officials generally have agreed with the civilian leadership that a deadline would strengthen insurgent and militia groups. But the failure of the Iraqi government to move forward on key political and security measures has left senior military leaders frustrated.

Although U.S. military leaders remain wary of the consequences of imposing deadlines, increasingly officers say they are starting to look more attractive. The shift in opinion is a sign that gridlock in the Iraqi government is seen as a greater threat to achieving stability in Iraq than the insurgency itself.

John Batiste, a retired major general who commanded a division in Iraq and has been critical of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said that setting a date for a drawdown of combat brigades must be considered. Before the deadline, Batiste said, the U.S. also needs to step up its effort to advise and train the Iraqi military and police.

"Holding the Iraqi government accountable is important, and that has everything to do with setting expectations and timelines," Batiste said. "It also has everything to do with doing all we can to ensure they are capable completing the task they are trying to do."

Some officers who have served in Iraq believe that much of the Iraqi government is not functioning effectively. Finding ways to force the sectarian factions to put aside their differences and focus on improving security and basic services must be the top priority in Iraq, these officers say. Without government reform, the Iraqi security forces are unlikely to ever be strong enough to take on the insurgency or the sectarian militias.

"It's basic counterinsurgency," said a military officer who has served in Baghdad and did not want to publicly disagree with the president's stated policy. "You have to have a trusted, capable government."

Some in the military argue that publicizing a timetable for reducing forces is far less damaging to a counterinsurgency campaign than the administration has suggested.

Many officers, particularly those who adhere to the military philosophy of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe that deadlines are necessary to avoid getting mired in an endless war fueled by enmity between Iraq's long-subjugated Shiite population and the Sunni Arabs who ran the government under Saddam Hussein.

So the criticism centres instead on the Bush administration's inept handling of the war. Canada's own Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leadership front-runner, tries to slough off his former enthusiastic support for the war by now saying he hadn't "anticipated how incompetent the Americans would be."

But incompetence is a side issue. The real problem is, and always has been, that it is illegal - not to mention immoral - for a country to invade another country, in other words, to wage a war of aggression.

The fact that Iraq is the last unharvested oil bonanza on earth, in an era of increasingly fierce global competition for dwindling oil reserves, only makes U.S. motives all the more suspect.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal concluded after World War II: "War is essentially an evil thing ... To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

If the U.S. had a genuinely open media, there would be a ferocious debate raging about how to deal with the fact that Washington initiated a war of aggression that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of Iraqis, and almost 3,000 Americans.

U.S. troops should be removed now.

As former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern argued in Harper's, the withdrawal should be accompanied by a payment of about $17 billion to compensate the Iraqi people for the immense suffering caused by the invasion. McGovern sets out in detail how the money should be allocated. He calculates that a U.S. pullout, even with a $17 billion payment, would save the U.S. $200 billion over the next two years, and help restore America's reputation.

This should please everyone except those - like Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton - who have profited handsomely from war and "reconstruction." Halliburton's energy services revenues were up 31 per cent in the most recent quarter. "Iraq was better than expected," Jeff Tillery, an energy analyst, was quoted in an Associated Press story last week.

The Bush administration won't pull out of Iraq because it doesn't want to abandon the 14 permanent U.S. military bases it's building there - or the oil.

The Iraqi government is under pressure to pass a new law to open up Iraq's vast oil reserves to foreign investment and ownership.

None of this is mentioned in the media's endless commentary on the war. What would wildly lucrative profits for Big Oil have to do with the U.S. involvement in Iraq?

With the SNP predicting a rebellion of around 30 anti-war Labour MPs, Tory support could be enough to overturn Mr Blair's majority of 62.
Downing Street remains steadfast in its refusal to hold an inquiry while British soldiers are still on the ground. The prime minister's official spokesman said that it would undermine British troops and send a signal of weakness to militants.

Today's motion will provide the opportunity for the first full debate on Iraq on the floor of the Commons since the invasion in 2003, when the Conservatives voted with the government in support of war.

The Conservative amendment calls for an inquiry along the lines of the Franks report into the Falklands war, once control in Iraq is handed back to Iraqis.

Such an inquiry would be the responsibility of an inquiry committee of independent privy counsellors, mostly drawn from outside the Commons. The nationalists' proposal, on the other hand, would see the issue considered by a select committee of seven senior MPs who are members of the Privy Council.

The Privy Council is principally made up of all present and former cabinet ministers, some present and former junior ministers, and the present and former leaders of the opposition parties.

The shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, said: "After the Falklands war we had the Franks inquiry and it will be a great pity if the government are dogmatically setting their face against a proper inquiry into what has gone right or wrong in Iraq.

"We are not asking for such an inquiry to be established immediately, only a commitment that one will be established eventually, before this time next year.

"A responsible government should want all possible lessons to be learned from the efforts to bring order and reconstruction to Iraq and should not be afraid of giving these issues the most searching examination."

Mr Blair's spokesman yesterday declined to answer questions on whether the prime minister would be prepared to countenance an inquiry once troops had quit the country.

"We have troops who are operating in the field of combat," said the spokesman. "We have an enemy who is looking for any sign of weakness at all, any sign of a loss of resolution or determination to see this job through.

"The important thing is that we do not give any signal that we are anything less than fully determined to see the job through."

Mr Hague dismissed those concerns today.

"It shows that we are a society that is able to learn and that's the great strength of our democracy," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Debates took place in the House of Commons about military events at the height of the first and second world wars. People didn't say: 'We mustn't ever debate these things because it might encourage the Germans.'"

Mr Hague said: "We are prepared, within the limitations of House of Commons procedures, to vote for something that would put pressure on the government.

"The practical effect, if the motion were to be carried later today, is that the government would have to come back to the House of Commons with their own proposals for an inquiry at the appropriate time, and we would back them in doing so.

"So we would vote that way to exert the necessary degree of pressure on the government."

But Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, suggested this morning that ministers would not vote for any inquiry, insisting that there had been enough already.

"I don't accept the conclusion of the motion that there should be a further inquiry," Ms Jowell told BBC Breakfast.

"There have been at least three rigorous and independent inquiries into the circumstances that led to the invasion of Iraq and I think that job was properly done at the time.

"What we have to focus on now is making the fledgling democracy in Iraq work and that's the purpose of our troops continuing to be there."