Politicians may have started negotiating a sweeping proposal to relieve American soldiers of their police duties, but many Iraqis are way ahead of their leaders. They gave up on the Americans some time ago and started paying for their own protection.
Some have turned to political militias, which have reappeared despite an American demand that they be disarmed, while others have turned to dozens of new private companies. Such companies were essentially illegal under Saddam Hussein, but in today's Iraq, business executives now say ''security'' the way American executives once said ''plastics.''
The urge for self-protection began as soon as looters started rampaging under the gaze of American soldiers, and it flourished after American occupation officials ordered the populace to disarm while they retreated into fortresses guarded by tanks and Nepalese Gurkhas.
''We had militias ready to protect people, but the Americans came in and dissolved everything and created a power vacuum,'' said Adel Abdul Mahdi, a senior official in the main Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He is one of the architects of a plan devised this week to send the American troops back to their bases and turn over police duties to militias working with local civic and tribal leaders under the supervision of the national government.
''The soldiers and the police are not going to eliminate the remnants of Saddam Hussein,'' Mr. Abdul Mahdi said. ''Only the local forces who know the Baathists can do that.''
Mr. Abdul Mahdi estimated that there were at least 40,000 members of the various militias who could be put to work. Some of the more than 10,000 members of his party's militia, the Badr Brigade, began providing armed security for pilgrims to the holy city of Najaf after a car bomb exploded outside a shrine there last month.
Leaders of the occupying forces have said they will not authorize independent militias for fear of civil war. But they have left open the possibility of militia members' working under the control of local and national government officials. In the Kurdish north, the autonomous region run by two political parties for the last decade, the parties' militiamen have been allowed to keep their guns and go on guarding buildings, and they have helped keep their region the safest part of Iraq.
American officials have said the rest of Iraq will become safer as they establish a national civil-defense force and put more trained policemen on the streets, but Iraqis remain skeptical. The police did not have a good reputation for controlling crime even when Mr. Hussein was their boss. Public order was maintained mainly through fear engendered by the secret police.
Now that the fear is gone, neighborhood merchants are pooling resources to hire their own security forces, and many prominent business executives and politicians have their own small armies of guards. When members of the Iraqi Governing Council complained that the American authorities were not offering them protection, one of the members, Ahmad Chalabi, provided it to his colleagues by sending some of his private guards.
Mr. Hussein, never one to tolerate competition, forbade private citizens to carry weapons, effectively outlawing the security industry. Now, it is one of Iraq's great growth industries, with local companies often forming partnerships with the established foreign companies that are rushing into the market.
Some of the foreign companies are American, but in this industry the British empire still rules. For those who can afford it, like Asian corporate executives or American television crews, the muscle of choice is a $1,000-a-day veteran of the British special forces. For the rest, a trained Iraqi guard can be hired for $25 a day or less.
One two-month-old Baghdad company, Near East Security Services, already has 250 employees guarding embassies, museums, ministries, foreign-aid groups, corporations and other clients here. Its executives, noting that Mr. Hussein had a quarter of a million men in the army and police force doing routine security work, estimate that there is a need for 100,000 to 150,000 more security guards to supplement the 65,000-member police force planned by American officials.
American officials have doubled police salaries and are trying to create a professional force, but what works in the United States is not necessarily practical here. How, for instance, do you run a background check on someone whose records were destroyed by the looting of government buildings in April?
The best way to hire workers, said Paul Evans, a British special forces veteran who manages operations in Iraq for Janusian Security Risk Management, a British company, is to adopt local customs: instead of relying on background checks and aptitude tests, consult the local sheik.
''When a client asks me to provide security guards in an area, I tell the tribal leader I will hire only his men and I will pay them well,'' Mr. Evans said. ''I still try to vet the men by looking at whatever records we can get, and I train them. But I need the sheik to assure their loyalty by putting his own reputation on the line. The Americans have got to learn to work with tribal leaders, because they have a lot more influence than any government officials.''
Disorder is generally good for the security business, of course; Janusian markets its services with a brochure that shows a flaming gasoline bomb in midair and asks, ''Should you have known things were going wrong?'' But the recent bombings have sent some clients fleeing the country. Still, the security companies say business is brisk.
''Some people did leave Iraq after the U.N. bombing, but now we're seeing more people wanting to come back with enhanced security,'' said Nicola Hudson of Control Risks Group, a British company that is one of the industry's largest. ''Also, the people who didn't leave are asking us to take new looks at the way they move around, whether they need armored vehicles, whether the walls of their buildings need hardening and their windows need blast protection.''
Why, when American soldiers are now the world's premier fighting force, do British veterans dominate in the security industry? One reason is that British forces have long traditions in Iraq and other former outposts of the empire. Another is their decades of experience policing Northern Ireland.
''The American forces are well trained for fighting wars, but the British have more experience in internal security,'' said Paul Rees, managing director of Centurion, a British company with many American media companies as clients. ''After dealing with terrorism in Northern Ireland, we're used to operating in built-up areas.''
American soldiers often seem to approach security as a form of warfare, especially at the palace in Baghdad used as the headquarters of the occupying forces. It is impossible for most people to get within hundreds of yards of the building, and those who make it past the barbed wire and tanks and American soldiers will run into yet another army, a private force of Gurkhas, the Nepalese-born soldiers who take an oath to the British throne.
''If you're trying to deal with a local security situation, I'll take a guard from the local sheik over a Gurkha any time,'' said Mr. Evans, the British security executive.
Mr. Abdul Mahdi said he and other political leaders had been asking the Americans to make better use of the expertise of Iraqis. ''There should be guardians from the neighborhood recruited to do patrols,'' he said. ''We need local ideas and practices. The Americans are safe inside their compounds and their tanks, but they have left the Iraqi people unarmed and insecure. Let the Americans take care of their own troops, and let us take care of ourselves.''