Just to make an increasingly horrible situation that much more volatile:

Bodyguards in Iraq turn to 'massive firepower' after attack

American bodyguards in Iraq want to strengthen their weaponry with hand grenades and high-powered machineguns after four private security consultants were murdered in Fallujah last week.

Only coalition soldiers are allowed to carry explosives under existing regulations, leaving up to 20,000 civilian contractors working as guards outgunned by insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machineguns.

The Coalition Provisional Authority is horrified by the contractors' plans to flout the rules, believing that such action could lead to a serious escalation in violence as the June deadline approaches for power to be transferred to the Iraqis....

--Chicago Sun-Times

Well, if the CPA doesn't want these guys using "massive firepower," doesn't want "loads of Americans running around grenading people" (those aren't my words -- see the link), maybe the CPA should take it up with the home office back in D.C. After all, the Bush administration clearly would rather let Iraq burn than reconsider Bush and Rove's utterly preposterous election-driven timetable for handover of power to the Iraqis, or Donald Rumsfeld's insistence that even a nation-building project that's the centerpiece of America's foreign policy should be done with pared-to-the-bone troop strength and significant outsourcing of military functions to well-meaning but largely unregulated rent-a-grunts.

(Link via INTL News.)