NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, 9 April 2004 — A Reuters photo by Ceerwan Aziz tells the evolving story of the US adventurism in Iraq. It’s like a shelf in an American toy store: Barbie, Ken, G.I. Joe, and then...

Let’s start over. With Barbie. She’s on the far left and unidentified, but is likely the new Iraqi female archetype and a possible coalition employee. Pants-suited, brunette tresses billowing down to her elbows. No headscarf in sight.

Next to her is Ken, the impeccably suited and tied US Administrator Paul Bremer, with pocket kerchief and flag lapel pin and nary a hair out of place. Things in Iraq can’t be so bad if Bremer can look so good, right?

Next to Bremer is G.I Joe, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, positively natty in head-to-toe khaki.

And far right, turned away from them all, is a sunglassed and goateed, beefy, muscular figure. His Kevlar vest lacks the military-issue collar, and a derivative M-16 with telescopic scope (perhaps a US-made Bushmaster, just like the Beltway Sniper used) is strapped across his chest and finger-on-trigger ready.

Call him Triggerman. He wears street clothes. He has turned away from the others and, with one ear wired to a headset, scans the crowd. Triggerman has removed the scope covers from his M-16, something coalition soldiers in Iraq are instructed to do only just before they’re ready to shoot.

Ready to rumble.

Triggerman’s not the kind of guy you’d think the Iraqis would reach out to happily with flowers and hugs. Any rational person would have second thoughts about going anywhere near him.

And that’s the idea.

Because this man is more than a soldier. He’s a contract “commando.”

Newspapers call him a “contractor,” and to most Americans, this means the guy they hire to remodel their kitchen or re-do their bathroom or build their dream house. Americans assumed “US contractors” were in Iraq to help restore infrastructure demolished by coalition troops during the war.

But in the bloody, churning streets of Iraq, “contractors” aren’t building or fixing things. The Washington Post now identifies them as “security contractors,” which still sounds ambiguous, implying their job is to plug in the burglar alarms.

But their job is to plug the enemy. They are Triggermen. And their derivative M-16s fire a NATO-compatible ammunition round so that they can use ammunition wherever US and coalition forces are.

Are they mercenaries? It seems to be a very fine line.

No one’s sure how many coalition-hired Triggermen are in Iraq. But four of them, all Americans, were killed and horribly mutilated in Fallujah last week. Bremer vowed to avenge their deaths. Kimmitt declared that revenge would be “at a time and a place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or capture them, and we will pacify Fallujah.”

Bremer claims the Triggermen were patriots martyred in “the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism.”

But was delivering democracy the Triggermen’s mission? All four worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, run by retired US Navy SEALS who named their company after the navy’s code for covert nighttime scuba diving missions. And adoption of a covert name gives a good idea of how Blackwater employees may envision their missions — below the radar line, and above the law.

The SEALS founded their soldier-for-hire outfit several years ago, when they realized there would be a need for “security” as the US military downsized forces while increasing operations abroad. Blackwater alone admits to having about 450 operatives in Iraq, most of them former Special Forces troops. Triggermen earn as much as $1,000 a day for providing “security” to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Presumably, danger-driven Triggermen know the score. They choose to confront hideous, hazardous violence for a living, and they are paid rather handsomely for it. That they sometimes meet with death is no surprise. To avenge them complicates things when the whole point of hiring professionals in the first place is to simplify things.

Kimmett promised to send the Marines into Fallujah to quell the unrest.

Maybe he should have done that in the first place.

Mercenaries are illegal combatants under laws of war and international law. International law requires mercenaries to obey their host state’s laws. They may be entitled to use self-defense if local law permits them.

The legal status of Triggermen remains to be seen. Apparently they are unaccountable to anyone except by a civil employment contract with the coalition.

At the recent siege on the coalition’s Najaf headquarters there were no US military personnel even present, and so no clear accounting for actions of the Triggermen even though they fired thousands of ammunition rounds and hundreds of 40 mm grenades.

There is now a new party — Triggermen — directly involved in Iraq, directly involved in killing.

We live in times more dangerous than we yet know.

— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and teaches law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.